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CHATS ABOUT BOOKS 
POETS AND NOVELISTS 



CHATS ABOUT BOOKS 



POETS AND NOVELISTS 



by y 

MAYO WILLIAMSON HAZELTINE 




NEW YORK 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1883 



.H3 



Copyright, 1883, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS. 



PRESS OF J. J. LITTLE 1 CO., 

NOS. 10 TO 20 AST03 PLACE, NEW YORK. 



The papers here collected, and in some measure 
revised, originally appeared in the Sunday edi- 
tions of the Sun. 

M.W.K 

New York, March 1, 1883. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

George Eliot 1 

Victor Hugo 14 

Two American Novels 72 

Swinburne 91 

Alphonse Daudet 151 

Longfellow 169 

Zola 188 

Whlttier 212 

Lord Beaconsfield's Endymion 227 

Nathaniel Hawthorne 260 

William Morris's Epic Poem 272 

Bret Harte 287 

Edwin Arnold's Light of Asia 300 

Charles Reade 326 

Jules Verne's Didactic Fiction 337 

Henry James, Jr 347 



CHATS ABOUT BOOKS. 



GEORGE ELIOT. 

The achievements of two women, our contemporaries, 
have dispelled some venerable fallacies respecting the 
scope and faculty of the feminine intellect. The presump- 
tion, doubtless, remains in force that a less wide and 
rigorous training, whose defects are not corrected but ac- 
cented by the subsequent exercise of functions relatively 
few and narrow, must tend to cripple, and in some 
directions paralyze, the constructive forces of the mind. 
It is likewise possible, if we may argue from analogy, 
that particular mental aptitudes, or incapacities, may be 
intensified by inheritance in a given sex. In this sense, 
therefore, it is still reasonable to speak of special laws 
which govern the intellectual work of woman. But 
these laws, which have sometimes been deemed inflexible, 
are now seen to be the affirmance of mere tendencies, 
which may be counteracted and largely overcome by 
the expansive pressure of remarkable dynamic qualities 
and an exceptional personal experience. This we know, 
because George Sand and, in a somewhat more decisive 
way, George Eliot, have done some of the very things 
which, it was supposed, women could not do. 



2 Chats about Books. 

If we accept the general yerdict of men we shall admit 
that women had never until the present century attained 
high excellence on the higher levels of art. They had 
given us clever letters, like Madame de Sevigne, shrewd 
reflections on life and books, like Madame de Sfcael, 
character sketches, carefully drawn, but pale in color, 
and adjusted to a narrow canvas, like Miss Austen, 
But they had never produced a drama or an epic poem. 
Neither had they shown themselves competent to execute 
that elaborate and comprehensive work of art to which 
Fielding gave consummate form, and which, partially 
divested of the atmosphere of humor with which he 
clothed it, and informed with a more serious spirit, 
might fitly be called the modern epic. Some thirty years 
ago, however, appeared a woman who, within the hori- 
zon of an English vicarage, brought to bear an intuitive 
discernment and a power of dramatic synthesis which, 
transferred to a wider theatre, might have created a large 
picture of human life. Yet Charlotte Bronte was but 
the precursor of George Eliot, and can only be said to 
have demonstrated that a great female novelist was a 
possibility. 

At the time when Mrs. Lewes published "Adam Bede," 
the conception of the novel popularly held in England 
had lost somewhat of the organic unity and symmetry 
which Fielding gave it. Conspicuously as Dickens and 
Thackeray outshone the elder novelist in specific lines 
of excellence, it would be not less idle to compare their 
narratives with " Tom Jones " in respect of coherence 



George Eliot, 3 

and cumulatiye evolution than to compare one of Shake- 
speare's plays with a G-reek tragedy. These masters of 
irony and pathos were perfectly alive to their own short- 
comings, and did not dispute the soundness of the prin- 
ciples to which they failed to conform. For what are the 
fundamental laws of the novel as laid down by the ex- 
emplar whom they never wearied of extolling ? That 
this species of composition, like the drama, must be 
built upon a skeleton of strong and well-compacted plot, 
and that the outward texture must reproduce not a class, 
a coterie, or eccentric social types, but broad human 
nature in its multifarious aspects. Moreover, the 
novel, as Fielding conceived it, had one mark of de- 
cisive difference from the drama, that it contemplated 
the slow and graduated development of character under 
the shaping of circumstances and the growth and recoil 
of passions. On the other hand, what lessons and criti- 
cisms might be interjected by way of prologue and in- 
terlude, what spirit, whether of mirth or sadness, of 
superficial tolerance or contempt, or of earnest question- 
ing and sympathy, would pervade the whole, would be 
determined by the taste and quality of the individual 
artist. It is doubtless true that one man's commentary 
may be more precious than another's text, and it is like- 
wise probable that some creations of Thackeray and 
Dickens are niched more securely in the memory even 
than " Parson Adams ; " nevertheless the fact remains 
that we commonly find ourselves dwelling less on what 
their actors do than on what the author says of them, 



4 Chats about Books. 

and that a single chapter or page may be taken up at 
random without a painful sense of dislocation. That 
this is so may be accounted a signal tribute to the con- 
stant charm of the novelist's style, but it manifestly im- 
pugns the perfection of his narrative as a coherent 
artistic structure. The truth is, we cannot help think- 
ing of Dickens or Thackeray as far brighter and more 
delightful than any one of their books, whereas Fielding 
lies buried beneath his greatest work, like an Egyptian 
king beneath his pyramid. 

But those principles of dramatic narrative which the 
young writer who named herself George Eliot found 
partially obscured in England were still paramount in 
France. Indeed, the astonishing fruits which their ap- 
plication produced in the hands of Balzac fixed the laws 
of the novel so rigorously that even such spirited, viva- 
cious histories as those of Erckmann-Chatrian are now 
assigned to a distinct category. Nor is it doubtful that 
George Sand had contributed not a little to enforce cor- 
rect artistic form. She is almost always successful in 
weaving a consistent, progressive plot, which, like a 
Latin sentence, shall hold back its meaning till the end, 
and the action of her female characters under the play 
of motives and the pressure of events is often evolved 
with a sustained, deliberate touch which in a feminine 
writer was unprecedented. Her portraits of masculine 
nature, however, are less life-like, and she seems to have 
painted vividly only the many phases of her own experi- 
ence, and those somewhat numerous types which came 



George Eliot. 5 

under her close personal observation. She had not Bal- 
zac's faculty of deciphering a whole biography from a 
word, a glance, a gesture ; and hence the middle and 
background of her canyas are peopled with shadows, and 
the long catalogue of her works cannot pretend to the 
title which Balzac not unreasonably gave his own, the 
Comklie humaine. 

A comparison of George Eliot with Balzac might not 
occur to those who classify writers by their spiritual in- 
fluence, yet it is pertinent, and the points of concord 
are not less suggestive than the points of contrast. 
Thus, in Balzac's ripest performances each incident 
serves not merely to project or unfold character, but is 
seen immediately, or subsequently, to be one of the piv- 
ots of the story. A like economy of materials is notice- 
able in " Scenes of Clerical Life," as well as in George 
Eliot's later books. Again, her actors, like those of the 
French novelist, are introduced in much the same way 
as they are made known to us in actual life, with cursory 
outward observations sufficient to frame a provisional 
judgment which further acquaintance will complete or 
modify. Neither are lay figures common on her stage, 
even subordinate persons as a rule being presented in 
clean, firm outline. The range of character which she 
thus interprets is too wide to have been gained by the 
study of living representatives, and implies the possess- 
ion of that species of divining-rod which is one of the 
least common of human gifts. Finally we seem to dis- 
cover in " Middlemarch " and " Daniel Deronda" — 



6 Chats about Boohs. 

dealing as they do with social grades and environments 
very different from those encountered in " Silas Maimer " 
and "The Mill on the Floss/' and yet different from 
each other — a distinct purpose to produce in the aggre- 
gate of her works an exhaustive picture of contemporary 
life. In all these respects, taken together, it will scarcely 
be disputed that no English novelist has approached so 
closely to the author of " Scenes de la Vie Parisienne" 

As an artist, then, George Eliot aims, not unsuccess- 
fully, to continue the traditions of Fielding and Balzac. 
Some of the latter's faults, too, she not only shares, but 
may be said to emphasize. He was over-fond, for 
example, of parading recondite learning, which, it is 
known, had to be crammed for the occasion ; and, while 
Mrs. Lewes' acquisitions are unquestionably of a more 
solid kind, she is by no means free from pedantry. 
Balzac, however, for the most part, confines his display 
of erudition or of technical knowledge to the initial 
portion of his story, and sometimes may justify himself 
by the necessity of creating a specific framework and 
atmosphere ; but when the plot is fairly under way, and 
the characters on the stage, he rarely frustrates his 
central purpose of lucid, forceful exposition by resorting 
to metaphors or allusions not capable of instant and 
general comprehension. On the other hand, we have 
noted many instances in " Middlemarch " and " Daniel 
Deronda " where, at critical junctures of the narrative, 
the grasp of the author's thought is thwarted for the 
ordinary reader by somewhat fantastic references to 



George Eliot, 7 

mediaeval or ancient literature. Xo one, of course, 
would attribute to George Eliot auy of the foolish 
motives which are usually associated with pedantic writ- 
ing, but we mean to say that she overrates the average 
culture of her audience ; which is a mistake no less 
serious than for an actor to pitch the voice too low. 
Another familiar criticism of Balzac is levelled at his 
passion for analysis. Few men, certainly, have tracked 
the windings of motive with a more ruthless persistency 
and unerring scent, but to the conscious possessor of such 
powers the chase is apt to seem of more consequence than 
the game. But in this form of self-indulgence Balzac 
preserved a certain timeliness and propriety, reserving 
his more dainty and patient manipulations for moments 
of suspense and preparation, for moods of doubt and 
vacillation, and contenting himself with swift, firm 
strokes at the critical stages of the action, or in the 
projection of strong feeling. George Eliot is not 
equally circumspect. More than once in " Daniel De- 
ronda," for example, when our sympathies have been 
intensely wrought upon, we are suddenly called to take 
part in an operation which is as unwelcome as vivisec- 
tion. Elsewhere, too, when analysis is in order, it is 
performed with an elaborate thoroughness which par- 
tially defeats its end, since in the multiplied flashings 
of the dissecting knife we lose sight of the slender 
filaments and nerve-centres we were asked to scrutinize. 
Many of her pages thus devoted to an exhaustive moral 
anatomy would have been compressed by Balzac into 



8 Chats about Boohs, 

paragraphs, and doubtless much careful work would 
thus have been sacrificed. But the reader's mind would 
have retained a more distinct impression, and is not 
this a test of art ? 

If we pass from technical qualities of workmanship 
to the moral atmosphere of her books, and the spiritual 
nobility embodied in certain characters, we find George 
Eliot moving on a plain attained by few English novel- 
ists, and certainly not by Balzac. There is in the Come- 
die humaine no goodness in the sense of lofty prin- 
ciples consciously self-imposed and nobly fruitful. You 
encounter kindly, unselfish instincts, maternal yearn- 
ing, filial affection, paternal devotion, and not seldom 
amorphous goody creatures moving sluggishly in the 
grooves of harmless habit, and who serve as foils to 
brilliant villains. But the clever people are always bad, 
and either Balzac's intuitive perceptions were sometimes 
dulled by rooted scepticism, or he never had the good 
fortune to meet such men as Deronda and Felix Holt, 
or such women as Eomola or as Dorothea in "Middle- 
march." On the other hand, in George Eliot's world 
all the robust, well-poised, regnant natures .are sooner or 
later enlisted on the side of worth and purity and of 
truthful, helpful living; as if to her mind the tremen- 
dous leavening influence of right-wishing minorities were 
the one supreme sign of power in history, and as if she 
could not imagine a sound, strong intellect not yielding 
ultimate acceptance to those principles of sympathy and 
self-control which formulate the wisdom and aspiration 



George Eliot. 9 

of the race. In conformity with her view of the laws 
which govern the genesis and collision of moral forces, 
her vicious, egotistical persons are always weak, and in- 
variably succumb in the end to the defeat or failure 
which awaits weakness. It is impossible to conceive of 
teaching more diametrically opposed to Balzac's, whose 
fifty volumes are so many sermons enforcing the gospel 
of self-seeking. We need not say that proofs and 
vouchers for the correctness of his doctrine were easily 
marshalled by one who considered a stalled ox and 
hatred therewith a more authentic measure of success 
than the scriptural alternative. 

There are probably no depths like those of remorse in 
men sincerely wishful of better things, and therefore a 
writer whose path lies along the heights has yet ample 
occasion to fathom the profundities of human nature. 
It is certain that as we follow George Eliot's portrayal 
of life in its fundamental and interior relations, we are 
startled by a sense of comprehensiveness and penetration 
with which few writers in this century have impressed 
us. We may know life, indeed, intensively, through 
the exhaustive study of a few types, and yet want the 
knowledge of its outward and transient aspects, the 
evanescent moods, ideals, standards, the manners, habits, 
fashions, which make up the livery of a particular age, 
and which must needs be familiar to the novelist who 
aims to be in some sort the mirror of his time. How far 
George Eliot is conversant with this superficial lore we 
are only beginning to discover, since on a cursory glance 



10 Chats about Boohs. 

her earlier worlds seemed to be bounded by one horizon 
— that of the humbler classes in the English community. 
Looked at more narrowly, they " reveal important 
differences in this respect, one book, for example, 
dealing with the agricultural laborer, and another 
with the artisan of large manufacturing centres. 
Again, in "Middlemarch," we had a presentation 
of the middle class in & dull provincial town, 
while in " Daniel Deronda " the social environment 
assigned to the foremost persons is that of the aris- 
tocracy. 

In this latest story the unfolding of character is man- 
aged with more than usual skill, and there are many 
evidences of intense sympathy on the part of the author 
with her work. The nucleus of the book is the funda- 
mental antithesis in respect of conduct and destiny be- 
tween two natures at bottom equally generous, but of 
which one has been warped and narrowed by habitual 
indulgence, the other braced and expanded by a sense of 
bereavement and isolation. The early planted conviction 
of illegitimate birth might have been expected to engen- 
der bitterness and resistance, but with Deronda it had an 
opposite effect. " As his mind ripened to the idea of 
tolerance toward error, he habitually linked the idea 
with his own silent grievances ; " and again, " the sense 
of an entailed disadvantage, the deformed foot doubt- 
fully hidden by the shoe, makes a restlessly active spirit- 
ual yeast, and easily turns a self-centred, unloving nature 
into an Ishmaelite. But in the rarer sort who presently 



George Eliot, 11 

see their own frustrated claim as one among a myriad, 
the inexorable sorrow takes the form of fellowship, and 
makes the imagination tender. Deronda's early wakened 
susceptibility, charged at first with ready indignation 
and resistant pride, had raised in him a premature 
reflection on certain questions of life ; it had given a bias 
to his conscience, and sympathy with certain ills and a 
tension of resolve in certain directions which marked 
him off from other youths much more than any talents 
he possessed." That, on the other hand, Gwendolen, the 
heroine, is not likely to be patient under crosses, and 
will probably marry for money the instant she is threat- 
ened with privations, is foreshadowed in the earlier 
pages. " The implicit confidence that her destiny must 
be one of luxurious ease, where any trouble that occurred 
would be well clad and provided for, had been stronger 
in her own mind than in her mamma's, being fed there 
by her youthful blood and that sense of superior claims 
which made a large part of her consciousness." Most 
readers will find it difficult to pity this young lady, who 
in her matrimonial venture had much ampler reason 
than most of her sex to know what she was doing, and 
in whose subsequent career stands forth the awkward 
fact that, being in love with another man, she allows her 
husband to drown. It is not surprising that Deronda 
should pity her, since he is rapidly falling in love with 
G-wendolen before the advent of Mirah, a Jewess and, 
superficially at least, a much more charming person. As 
might be inferred from the title, the main interest of 



12 Chats about Boohs. 

the novel is centred in Daniel Derond, who, under the 
shaping of personal disappointment and generons action 
on behalf of others, develops energies and qualities 
which would have been utterly thrown away in the role 
of an English country gentleman. Our sense of the fit- 
ness of things demands a larger field for him, and we 
therefore share his satisfaction when he turns out to be 
a Jew — that is, to belong to a race with whom and for 
whom an earnest, large-minded man may find something 
positive and urgent to do. 

On the humor which relieves and lightens the dominant 
seriousness of the book we do not need to dwell. There 
are gleams and flashes of it from many subordinate char- 
acters, but the thread of comedy is chiefly sustained by 
Deronda's supposed uncle, Sir Hugo Mallinger, by Hans 
Meyrick, a painter, and by Parson Gascoigne. The mo- 
tives of this mundane yet worthy ecclesiastic are set 
forth with the dry, incisive, and perfectly good-tempered 
irony of which George Eliot seems to have the secret. 
On the whole, more space is give in " Daniel Deronda " 
to the levities and gayeties of life than in the other novels 
of this writer. 

As an artistic story, framed in strict accordance with 
the laws of form, neither of George Eliot's latest works 
need shrink from comparison with the great masters of 
narrative whom we have named above. As a reflex of 
contemporary manners, "Daniel Deronda" covers a 
broader canvas than " Middlemarch," but it is no less 
painstaking and true, and few men probably, whatever 



George Eliot, 13 

their creed or s &6ol, will rise from a perusal of the story 
without an impression strong upon them that this world 
is not Vanity Fair, as Balzac and Thackeray paint it, 
but a place of labor and endurance, where he is wisest 
and happiest who recognizes and fulfils his duty. 



VICTOR HUGO. 
I. DRAMAS. 

The appearance of a new and revised edition of Vic- 
tor Hugo's dramas directs attention to the scope and 
quality of the author's achievements in that direction. 
Although the prestige of the lyric poet and the novelist 
have in some degree obscured earlier triumphs in 
another field of art, yet it is certain that the plays which 
Hugo wrote some forty years ago did for a time 
illumine the French stage with gleams of its former 
glory. Moreover, they have been reproduced, in one 
form or another, in libretto, translation, or paraphrase, 
by the great theatres of the world, in London, St. 
Petersburg and New York. 

Perhaps no young author has suffered more than 
Hugo from the difficulties and prejudices which beset 
the stage. Announcing himself as an innovator, he 
was, of course, proclaimed an outlaw. Splendid names, 
beloved traditions, revered canons of art, were invoked 
against him, until an outraged public opinion seconded 
a suspicious Government and inspired a truculent press. 
He began by a declaration of war and printed " Crom- 
well." Official bureaus, college lecture halls, drawing 
rooms and coffee houses were scandalized by the prin- 
ciples of dramatic art put forth in the preface and elab- 

14 



Victor Hugo. 15 

orated in the play. The Latin quarter, however, 
swarmed with partisans of the heresy, and the director 
of the Odeon was persuaded to offer his theatre to Hugo. 
" Amy Eobsart " was acted and failed. Next the poet 
wrote "Marion de Lorme" and submitted it to the 
Theatre Francais. It ran the gauntlet of the com- 
mittee, and thereupon was strangled by an interdict. 
But Hugo was indomitable, and soon had a fourth piece 
ready. Hitherto his opponents had contented them- 
selves with skirmish and ambush, but the first repre- 
sentation cf "Hernani" gave the signal of ]:>itched bat- 
tle. Provisioned with sausages and bread, the students 
faithful to Hugo mustered early in the field. Longhair 
and matted beards, wild eyes, catcalls and savage yells 
affrighted the proprieties of the place, while flaming 
waistcoats and ragged trousers, coats and hats of every 
epoch and shape confronted and astonished the suave 
elegance of Paris. Such contests have but one result. 
Enthusiasm infects the critic, the pit electrifies the 
boxes. "Hernani" secured for the moment all the 
triumph its author could desire, and the romantic drama 
gained a foothold on the stage of Eacine. 

In the next year, moreover, the Government of Charles 
Dix was overthrown, and the play (" Marion de Lorme ") 
which had provoked its censure, was welcomed at the 
Porte Saint-Martin. These victories were encouraging 
but not conclusive, and the dramatic Luther had yet 
much work to do. It was still, in fact, an open question 
whether the novel heresy would end in schism or in 



16 Chats about Books. 

smoke. Two years later " Le Eoi s' Amuse " was in re- 
hearsal at the Comedie Francaise, and again the literary 
reactionists massed their forces to repel the intruder. 
An intrigue, hatched at the side scenes, reached minis- 
terial circles, and the piece was stopped after one night's 
performance ; whereupon the author sued the theatre, 
and indirectly impeached the conduct of the Govern- 
ment. The courts rejected his claim. He hastened to 
complete " Lucrece Borgia," and appeal to a different 
tribunal. The new play was produced at the Porte 
Saint-Martin, and tumultuous applause proclaimed the 
verdict of the people. 

In the following year " Angelo " took possession of 
the Comedie Franchise ; but the devotees of tra- 
dition, baited in their last stronghold, turned once more 
at bay. The Society of the Theatre Frangais had bound 
itself to enact the works of Hugo so many times a year. 
It broke the contract. Obsolete rules were resuscitated 
to embarrass the author, and the claque was instructed 
to hiss him. Actresses whose robust vigor lent to other 
roles a spurious vitality were ostensibly made ill by the 
recurrence of the detested novelties. The poet was 
at length compelled to sue for a mandamus and dama- 
ges against the company. But meanwhile a silent revo- 
lution had been effected in public opinion. The Tribu- 
nal of Commerce sustained both his demands. The 
matter was carried to a higher court, but the decree was 
affirmed. The fight was over. Envy and prejudice 
might continue to sneer, but henceforth despaired of 



Victor Hugo. 17 

stifling Hugo. The conscientious artist now became a 
prosperous man. Like Corneille lie had written for 
bread, but, unlike Corneille, he had never sacrificed con- 
victions to necessities. We may fairly say that if the 
father of French tragedy had evinced the resolution and 
self-confidence of Hugo, the " Cid " would have had 
worthy companions, , and such a direction would have 
been imparted to the G-allic stage as might have led 
Racine to consecrate his delicate genius to elegies and 
lyrics rather than dramas, and permitted Voltaire to 
profit by the hints he gleaned from Shakespeare. 

The popular play of "Ruy Bias" was presented in 
1837, and during the five ensuing years the dramatist 
was silent. At length to the Theatre Francais, which 
had so often slighted and betrayed him, he gave his mas- 
terpiece, " les Burgraves." This was his last drama. 
Since 1842 Victor Hugo has abandoned the theatre for 
the tribune of the novelist. He had persuaded a city 
to become his audience, and it is scarcely hyperbole to 
say that he now persuades a world. 

To gauge the power and appreciate the innovations 
of Hugo, considered as a dramatic poet, we have to 
recall the creeds and opinions which governed Paris 
at his debut. It was a period of reaction, the brief 
and bitter day of Charles Dix. They who had thought 
and legislated for one-half of Europe seemed to have 
retained neither laws nor convictions of their own. 
The city which had worshipped Mirabeau, struck with 
Robespierre, and summoned a Pope to crown Napoleon, 



18 Chats about Boohs. 

now cowered before the voice of bigotry and prescrip- 
tive right. The Polignac Ministry did not hesitate to 
proclaim a cynical indifference for public opinion 
which even Choiseul would have disguised, the Church' 
clamored for a censorship which would have strangled 
the Encyclopaedists, while the courts of law betrayed 
precedent to policy with a supple compliance which 
Louis Quinze would have sought in vain from the old 
Parliament of Paris. Precisely as the political upheaval 
had resurrected the principle of caste, the social recoil 
determined a literary reaction. That self-dissection of 
Jean Jacques, which had once impressed a painful lesson, 
only alarmed and sickened the tender stomachs of the day. 
The wholesome reforms and bold method of Diderot's 
drama now became a butt and byword to charlatans who 
tricked by rule. The pulpit had quite forgotten the accents 
of Bossuet's courtly sincerity, while the tribune would 
have quaked beneath the temperate speech of the G-ironde. 
And, finally, the press, reduced to choosing between a 
bribe and a gag, found all novelties dangerous, and merit 
in everything old. In a word, thought stagnated ; her 
arteries were choked ; only a thin and sluggish current 
crawled backward along shrunken veins. What hope 
was left to dramatic art, misled by unsound methods, 
perplexed by arbitrary distinctions, haunted by the 
memory of an echo, the shadow of a shade ! 

There were divers iron rules which cramped the en- 
ergies of the French dramatist, but, above all, he was 
enjoined to respect the so-called unities. A glance at 



Victor Hugo. 19 

those dethroned despots may be permitted, for so long 
as men read Greek tragedies at school, and see French 
tragedies enacted, the ghost of the old quarrel is likely 
to revisit the stage. 

In the history of letters there is no more impressive 
instance of the mental paralysis induced by a shallow 
and servile learning than the subjection of the French 
drama to the unities of time and place. Following Boi- 
leau with unequal steps, critics who read Seneca in 
French and Aristotle in a Latin translation presumed to 
interpret Athenian art and regulate their country's. 
They proclaimed Aristotle an oracle, forgetting that the 
keenest eyesight is confined by its horizon, and that he 
certainly was not infallible who submitted the effects 
of art to the microscope of utility. They seem to have 
overlooked or ignored the fact that the Greek tragedies 
themselves sometimes violate their pretended laws. In 
the " Eumenides," for instance, Orestes flies from Del- 
phi to Athens, and the " Agamemnon " opens with the 
beacon fire which announces the downfall of Troy, 
while in the course of the piece the King has completed 
his voyage from the Hellespont to Argos. Altogether 
too timid to dream of correcting, or even verifying their 
master's dicta, the censors of the French stage were 
ready enough to pervert them. Aristotle had merely 
noted the historical fact that most dramas of his day 
happened to observe certain limits of time and place. 
To inquire, however, whether this peculiarity was es- 
sential or accidental seems not to have occurred to men 



20 Chats about Books. 

who understood neither the functions of a chorus nor 
the mechanism of the Attic stage. But it is plain 
that under the conditions of the modern theatre the 
fervor of popular enthusiasm and the gush of genu- 
ine sympathy ignore the restrictions of their theory. 
We find it no tax upon him who has learned to loye 
Desdemona in Venice to attend her to Cyprus, and 
easily as the Afrite in the Persian tale, "Hernani" 
transports the entranced mind from the palace of 
Euy Gomez to the tomb of Charlemagne. So, too, in 
"Goetz von Berlichingen " we gallop from city to 
castle and from month to month with the reckless speed 
of his own troopers ; yet our interest, still untired, sits 
rooted behind the saddle. 

There is no doubt one sort of unity which any clear- 
sighted man who has witnessed a dozen plays recog- 
nizes quite as distinctly as the watchers on the critical 
Zion. The current phrases, aesthetic unity, unity of 
interest, of impression, of design, describe the same 
thing from different points of view. An effective drama 
undoubtedly must be coherent and determinate. It 
will neither perplex the judgment nor scatter the sym- 
pathies of an audience, but evolve a single catastrophe, 
decipher a central thought. No one would deny that to 
waft the imagination across long intervals, lulling mean- 
while calculation and sustaining enthusiasm, may enhance 
the difficulty of the feat, but difficulty is a spur and not a 
wall to genius. It is clear, moreover, that a drama is not 
an episode ; that a genuine unity of action implies, as Aris- 



Victor Hugo. 21 

totle said, a beginning, a middle, and an end. In other 
words, great passions cannot be adequately conceived 
without a view of their development ; but how rarely 
is such perspective possible within the compass of a day 
or the limits of a single scene ! No doubt some frigid 
works may have owed compactness, but it is equally 
certain that noble plays have sacrificed vitality to the fic- 
titious unities of place and time. Compare, for exam- 
ple, "Andromache" and " Le Eoi s' Amuse." The 
action of Kacine's tragedy takes place within thirty 
hours. We are shown at the outset four passions 
wrought already to the uttermost point of tension. 
The headlong appetite of Pyrrhus is ready to spurn the 
most sacred obligations and insult his affianced bride. 
On the other side, Orestes is swept by a flaming sym- 
pathy toward treachery and murder. In Hermione 
wounded pride has trampled upon modesty and pity, 
while Andromache's maternal tenderness is on the 
brink of self-immolation. Of course, the poet knew 
that his audience would call these passions to account, 
would instinctively demand their source and provoca- 
tion. He was aware that the heart does not grow white 
hot in a single day, or without ample fuel, and accord- 
ingly a large part of the tragedy is purely historical. 
The persons of the piece recount their wrongs and jus- 
tify their projects. The result is, we are moved, but by 
no means electrified ; attention is secured, but not rap- 
port. It is otherwise in Hugo's drama. The action 
covers several weeks, and the scene is often shifted. We 



22 Chats about Books. 

are made to see the budding heart of Blanche interpret- 
ing its secret, and slowly learning to comprehend her 
woe. The cruel levity of Francis has leisure to fancy, 
to pluck, and discard a flower. Again, the rage and 
despair of Triboulet do not merely daze and startle, 
like the play of transient lightning, but riyet the gaze 
like the blazing passage of some comet. In a word, 
throughout the piece we watch the growth and catch 
the fire of passion. Does it not appear from this in- 
stance that even illusion, which rigorous limitations 
were supposed to insure, may be lost in classic and 
favored in romantic plays ? 

It was a remark of Schlegel, which has been seized 
and expanded by later writers, that even the literature 
of the Greeks is rather plastic than pictorial, and his 
suggestion seems to throw some light on the whole 
method of their drama, as well as on the unquestionable 
tendency toward a unity of place and time.- If we 
choose to admit that the Attic tragedy, yielding to a 
dominant instinct of Greek art, aimed rather at group- 
ing than perspective, we shall at all events under- 
stand its exclusive recourse to the bold outline and 
austere simplicity of Hellenic myths. Whatever we 
may think of this view of the Greek drama, it is certain 
that the genius of romance languages obeys a different 
impulse, and prefers a broader argument. Her voice — 
if she would master us — must be freighted with our 
nearest hopes, and speak to our liveliest sympathies. It 
is probable, for instance, that an English audience 



Victor Hugo. 23 

would have crowned Phrynichus, and not fined him, 
for the effective stage treatment of a contemporary 
event. 

Grant, however, that it is possible to find a modern 
theme whose scope consents to the limitations of classic 
rule, the second canon of French critics struck at the 
root of right method. Instead of applying gyres, like 
the pseudo unities, it communicated a taint ; or rather 
genius under their hands shared the fate of Atys, for a 
slavish devotion to the suave and fine mutilated virile 
art. To what should we attribute the artificial tone 
and dainty, finish which distinguished the literature of 
the ancien regime ? TTe cannot ascribe it to a secret 
bias of the language inherited from that most artful 
and involved medium of thought, the written Latin, for 
the Castilian literature, which is by no means finical, 
reproduces more faithfully the structure and idiom of 
the mother tongue. Neither does the influence of 
a court account for the persistent tendencies of two 
centuries. Undoubtedly that influence was profound. 
Art kissed the hand of patronage, and not seldom 
wore her livery, while to literature a modest station 
was allotted at the monarch's levees, provided she 
wore the costume and manners of the place. Pen- 
sions nourished and an academy crowned the lucky 
favorites of the hour. Versailles, indeed, flattered the 
tastes and foibles of Eacine, until the author of " Es- 
ther " and " Berenice " consented to dignify in those 
figures the widow Scarron and Louise de la Valliere. 



24 Chats about Books. 

But although the printing press seems essential to the 
absolute independence of letters, the forcing house of 
patronage has sometimes failed to stunt their growth, 
or subdue their flavor. Calderon, for instance, was a 
courtier ; Chaucer was a protege of princes. Clearly 
the peculiarities of personal character, the attitude and 
pressure of individual minds, which some sociologists 
would have us disregard, are factors indispensable for 
the solution of many problems. But for the weight of 
Shakespeare's authority, for example, the correct and 
scholarlike Johnson might have turned the scale against 
Marlowe and Fletcher, and, as it was, he held his own 
for almost a century. So, too, had Regnier lived to 
contest the supremacy of letters he would scarcely have 
suffered Malherbe and the pedants to chastise the grace- 
ful nonchalance of Eonsard, and affix that stamp of 
preciseness and propriety which has cramped the strings 
of the French lyre. Unquestionably the classic literature 
of France caught much of its elegance and polish from 
the court which fostered it, but it finally and utterly 
succumbed to the controlling charm of Boileau's pencil 
and the chisel of Racine. Of the drama at least this 
may be said, for it was long the creed of Frenchmen 
that Racine had given tragedy a perfect and immutable 
form — that she left his hands a flawless statue which his 
successors might multiply by casts, but were not to 
dream of tooling. A glance at the poet's life will best 
interpret the spirit of his work. As sympathetic as 
Goldsmith, and almost as shy as Hawthorne, his .sensi- 



Victor Hugo. 25 

tive and pensive nature early sought a refuge from the 
fame which, in his brief career of courtier, had occa- 
sioned some hours of rapture and many tears. His 
home long withheld him from the theatre, and in the 
bosom of domestic joys peace healed and religion com- 
forted a heart which seems to haye been bruised and 
frightened by the shocks and clamors of the world. 
Now, bestow on such a man such a mentor as Boileau, 
place him for a season in the atmosphere of Versailles, 
and you may easily seize the posture of his mind, and 
forecast his method. Himself of a cautious temper, 
and tutored by the French Addison, Racine owed it to 
the stubborn fire of a creative genius that his plays were 
not as frigid as " Cato." But although Boileau could 
not clip his pupil's wings, he could, and did, direct his 
course. "Leave," you can hear him say, "to rude 
Shakespeare and Moorish Calderon their sublime flights 
and falls. Choose for thy safer realm the tableland of 
the beautiful, unvexed by the grotesque and trivial 
aspects of common life, unshadowed by the giddy sum- 
mits, beset with so many dangers and so hard to scale." 
Such counsels Racine would embrace with ardor, since 
they countenanced his tastes. And, in fact, everything 
was disposed to favor his treatment of the drama. Cor- 
neille had disavowed the impulse which had once led him 
toward the Spanish theatre, and renounced the promise 
of the Cid, so that no rival theories disputed and no tra- 
ditions embarrassed the stage. Even prejudice encour- 
aged Racine, and he was destined to ennoble prejudice. 
2 



26 Chats about Boohs. 

In his earliest piece Eacine announced the principles 
of his art. Tragedy henceforward must look well to 
her gown, compose her features, and move with a meas- 
ured step. The troubles and perplexities of domestic 
life, homely passions, vulgar griefs, are summarily ban- 
ished to comedy and farce. The argument and charac- 
ters must be drawn from remote times, modern history 
being discarded, as wanting in perspective and in the 
mist and halo which are conferred by age. Greek 
myths and Roman chronicles will afford the safest 
themes, but lest their rugged lines and sombre color- 
ing offend a polished taste, let* them be softened and 
mellowed, so that the eye which is overawed by grand- 
eur may be won by delicacy. Some of the results of 
this method are amusing. Thus the savage fortitude 
of Porus, by a curious anachronism, is tempered to a 
Christian resignation, and a tinge of Gallic gallantry 
refines the Roman features of the son of Vespasian. 
The stern spirit of a Hebrew virgin might prove forbid- 
ding, but she will be sure, it seems, to awaken sympathy 
when she is made to breathe the gentle piety of Port 
Royal. In like manner the stalwart forms of Achilles 
and Alexander will gain in grace what they lose in 
majesty by kneeling to the tender passion. 

Of course the studied refinement and chastened pathos 
of such compositions required a language of their own — 
a sustained and careful diction, tolerably elastic, no 
doubt, and sonorous, but modulated with nice precision, 
and confined to a limited range. And accordingly, if 



Victor Hugo. 27 

Kacine's style rarely startles or electrifies, if its dignity 
is sometimes inappropriate, we may be sure it will never 
shock, and will almost always please. Whatever we 
may think of his method, it is certain that Eacine 
exhausted its capacity of charm. Great critics like 
Boileau proclaimed the beauty of his ideal, and ap- 
pluaded the consummate realization. Minor critics, 
whose myoptic glance missed the plan and proportions 
of the edifice, could at least decipher the elaborate 
frieze and admire the mosaic pavement. Palace and 
boudoir loved him, and they love him still. It was 
shrewdly said of his tragedies, which have always been 
well received by the fashionable world, and by no other, 
that even in foreign countries they somehow find their 
birthplace. 

This was the model and these were the principles of dra- 
matic art which Victor Hugo found in possession of the 
French theatre. It was not in him to do them homage, 
for he was truly a son of the century, and his spirit 
owned no kinship with the laureates of the old regime. 
Passing part of his youth in Spain, and always an ardent 
admirer of England, he had studied the romantic drama 
in its birthplace and second home, and by comparison 
the classic tragedy of Prance appeared a false and frozen 
thing. Moreover, temperament conspired with training 
to shape the poet's course. A glowing fancy and an 
eager heart had made Hugo's youth lustrous and fruit- 
ful. He became a fervent and earnest man. While his 
nerves tingled with buoyant life and the blood ran lustily 



28 Chats about Boohs. 

in his veins, he was not one to loiter and dream in a 
lotos land, or people with graceful shadows an artificial 
stage. Altogether too restless for reverie, realities alone 
had power to fire his sympathies. It is given to such 
men, through the crash and tumult of daily strife, to 
detect some flute-like notes of beauty, and while others 
seek a pathos distilled through ancient legend these 
have the skill to catch the fragrant balm as it oozes 
from the wounded bark. Those who, like Hugo, recog- 
nize a kind of priesthood in their function of poet hold 
truth always noble and elegance often false. All that 
which oppressed Eacine — the rush and scramble of in- 
terests, the jostlings and trampliugs of the street, smoke 
of market and din of forum — cannot tease or cloud a 
robust and sunny spirit, and while delicacy cannot 
seduce, so even the ridiculous cannot dismay him ; 
hence all the levities, humors, and follies which had 
been exiled by the tragic muse are welcomed back by the 
apostle of romanticism to the French stage. In a word, 
Hugo's method sought to win from nature her effects of 
light and shade. Like her, he would compel the trivial 
to relieve or heighten the sublime. He will profit, too, 
by Kegnier's hint that nonchalance is the refinement of 
artifice. And, finally, his canvas will disclose to us the 
Janus face and latent power of the grotesque, leagued 
on one side with terror and clinging on the other to the 
tendrils of pity. 

Thus, to seek concrete examples, we are made to feel 
an awful irony in the contrast of Triboulet's cap and 



Victor Hugo, 29 

bells with his scheme of Satanic vengeance. And, 
again, throughout the play of " Kuy Bias " the friction 
of an elaborate etiquette serves to chafe an explosive 
passion. The trifling of Louis Treize accentuates the 
anguish of Marion de Lorme, while the despair of 
her sombre lover is sharply projected by a comrade's 
heedless levity. During the supper given in Ferrara, 
mirth and dalliance strew flowers in the path of trea- 
son, and a jovial drinking song preludes a chant of 
death. So, under the shadow of fatality which shrouds 
the fortress of the Burgraves, a knot of slaves amuse 
their misery with tales and lively jests. 

Now, the sharp drawing and vivid tints which stamp 
Hugo's characters are mirrored in his diction. Abrupt 
transitions of style, a large diversity of tones, variety in 
rhythm and caesura, help to discriminate personal traits 
and emphasize posture or feeling. To come to particu- 
lars, his old men in conversation are sometimes senten- 
tious, sometimes garrulous ; his young men now fervid 
and now volatile. The prattle of girlish innocence sounds 
in his scenes arch and confiding, while the words of 
mature women are made impetuous and intense. To 
soldiers he lends the bluff speech of bivouac and foray ; 
to lovers, melting accents of tenderness or thrilling 
bursts of passion. He allots pertness to ladies' maids, 
dignity to duchess and queen ; is careful to confine 
elegance to courts, and leaves the cottage its simplicity. 
Faithful, in brief, to the laws of real life, the voice of 
every person is flexible, not monotonous, matches the 



30 Chats about Boohs, 

sentiment of the moment, and soars or sinks through 
the gamut of emotion. 

After all, this was Skakespeare's method, and needs 
no sponsor to English ears, but it was the mission of 
Victor Hugo to impart and endear it to France. The 
antique tragedy, which on Athenian soil was a genuine 
and noble growth, transplanted to a modern stage had 
become an anachronism and an absurdity ; whereas that 
drama which, born and matured in romance languages, 
has been termed romantic, is native and alive. The 
wise scrutiny of Hugo has sought to probe the open 
wounds of humanity and listen to the throbbing heart, 
while the genius of Eacine did little more than lay sweet 
garlands on a tomb. The romantic drama cherishes the 
naive sincerity of truth, and reveals her naked loveli- 
ness ; but it was the aim and boast of pseudo-classic 
tragedy to tutor her artless grace and imprison in sump- 
tuous vestments the free lines of nature. Accordingly, 
docile to his teacher's behest, the patient style of Ra- 
cine weeded out every blemish and planted in the crev- 
ice a flower. On the other hand, with characteristic 
contempt for finical elegance, Hugo gave to a prosaic 
date the initial line of " Cromwell." 

Hugo was destined in his role of iconoclast to confound 
the traditional distinction of styles. The French theatre 
had branded their admixture as treason to the principles 
of art ; and our own stage has sometimes protested against 
the so-called irregular drama. Ben Jonson, for instance, 
would not countenance it. "Alexandre" and "Les 



Victor Hugo, 31 

Plaideurs " are not more dissonant in tone and treatment 
than "Sejanus" and "The Alchemist." It is plain, 
too, that Dryden disapproved of Shakespeare's variable 
manner, and some professed partisans of the latter have 
failed to wholly understand it. That blending of the 
grave and gay, the chiaroscuro of romantic drama, pro- 
ceeds not only from a conscious fidelity to nature's con- 
trasts and vagaries, but perhaps also from a secret drift 
and bias peculiar to the spirit of modern life. Un- 
clouded elevation, unclouded joy, were moods familiar 
enough to the Athenian ; but is it possible to catch 
more than glimpses of them in modern skies ? On 
the other hand, is it possible to translate into classic 
Greek without a paraphrase the complex ideas (involving 
a background and antithesis) suggested by "earnest- 
ness" or "sport"? And why not? Because the sen- 
sation of the moment was in a very literal sense mistress 
of the Attic breast, whereas the atmosphere of a Chris- 
tian world is surcharged with hope and terror, and the 
senses are in theory and tend to become in fact only ser- 
vants in the house of conscience. We may say that, like 
the oaks of their Dodona, the majesty of antique tragedies 
was rooted in repose, and that their sublimity had a 
background of serenity, like thunder from a clear sky. 
It is otherwise in Christian art. Eaith and fatality 
checker the sober side of our drama with broken lights 
and shades. The poet's watchful attitude and serious 
mien betray the tension of a spirit stung by high 
aspirings and environed by gloomy fears, and we per- 



32 Chats about Boohs. 

ceiye that, unrelieved by gayety, the heart might snap 
beneath the strain. Therefore it is that Hamlet is 
fain to seek in transient sallies a respite from stifling 
thonght or to lull with fitful raillery his agony for 
Ophelia's treason. 

Eyen on the cheerful side of our literature there are 
traces of a like recoil. There is sunshine truly, but the 
wind is sighing in the trees, and a rainbow chronicles 
the recent shower. In short, laughter which dimpled 
the Grecian cheek reyeals the wrinkles of our modern 
care-worn faces. The mirth of Attic comedy exhaled 
the heedless joy of purely sensuous existence, whereas 
the humor of Jacques, of Don Quixote, and of Moliere's 
Ariste, is distilled from melancholy, and the pungent 
liquor betrays the source. Thus it happens that to in- 
terpret the Athenian character you must supplement 
Sophocles by Aristojmanes, while you may almost say 
that a single romantic drama (like "Hamlet" for in- 
stance) in itself reflects the scope and exhausts the pos- 
tures of the modern mind. It seems probable that the 
composite manner of Shakespeare reproduced by Victor 
Hugo was not so much an invention or foible of the poet 
as an instinct of the time. 

Haying indicated Hugo's method, we need dwell but 
briefly on its fruits. An intuitiye insight and a stern 
(almost a grim) sincerity were guarantees that most of his 
creations would be quickened with natiye fire. Should 
he select, for instance, for his protagonist a sinful but 
ardent soul, panting to redeem her shortcomings, he will 



Victor Hugo. 33 

not fill her mouth with eloquent apology, but goad her 
into action and bid her live her misdeeds down. If it 
be a gentle, pensive shape which haunts his memory, he 
does not content himself with a kindly biography, but 
bids us dwell upon the winning features and mark the 
touching yoice. Hugo has made some of the offspring of 
his brain our comrades and bosom friends. He may claim 
to have animated with men and women a stage which 
since Moliere's death had been surrendered to dreams 
and shadows. Through the haze which had for many 
years shrouded the French theatre, his nervous and sinewy 
forms push their way toward the light and compel recog- 
nition. You will not refuse, for example, to greet 
Eodolpho cordially, for he is Romeo's cousin. Ruy 
Gomez had perhaps derived from Moorish ancestors his 
sombre, wakeful jealousy, and we, who know Othello, 
comprehend the pangs of a proud spirit perplexed in the 
extreme. There, again, is Don Salluste, in "Ruy 
Bias," who seems to stalk among the foremost of that 
cynical and ruthless crew which allows Richard Crook- 
back and Iago the merit of a bad pre-eminence. To our 
English eyes Don Caesar, in the same piece, seems more 
lifelike than Moliere's wits, and should be not unwel- 
come to the merry board where Prince Hal and Biron 
clink glasses with Mercutio. And we doubt if any 
of Shakespeare's heroes might challenge with more 
sovereign justice than Hernani the devotion of a wom- 
an's heart. In loyalty and tenderness, in love and 
in war, he is a true son of the Cid. On the other hand, 



34 Chats about Boohs. 

although Triboulet is a careful study in morbid anatomy, 
Hugo's genius has for the most part shunned grappling 
with profound and problematic natures like Faust, Ham- 
let and Wallenstein. He soars highest in his latest drama. 
Prospero, Wolsey, and John of Gaunt had already por- 
trayed for us the noble dignity conferred by suffering 
and age, but we can hardly refuse to recognize their 
peers in the venerable trio which controls the actions of 
"The Burgraves." These august and massive figures 
are made to type with bold distinctness the rugged hon- 
esty, the ferocious independence, and the splendid aspi- 
ration of Germany under her great Suabian Emperor. 
The same struggle between license and order, savage 
virtues and wise restraints, which blazed forth for the 
last time under Maximilian, inspired Goethe's famous 
play, but we suppose that even a candid German would 
acknowledge that "The Burgraves" is in every way 
superior to " Goetz von Berlichingen." 

Love governs with paramount authority the plot of 
romantic drama. Indeed, even Racine and his followers 
were constrained to obey what seems the master impulse 
of modern life (at least as we see that life reflected in lit- 
erature), and give Greek and Roman bosoms a form of 
sentiment they rarely knew. But amid the classical scenes 
and persons of Racine love is felt to be an intruder and an 
impertinence, whereas in Spanish and English plays he 
is priest and king. To explain the prominence and ideal 
purity with which romance literature has invested the 
sexual affection might possibly involve us in an analysis 



Victor Hugo. 35 

of those tides and currents which form the undertow of 
life in a Christian world. Without essaying to define 
or trace the genesis of the complex modern passion, we 
may point out that Hugo is not content to photo- 
graph a single j)hase, but discriminates the shapes 
and hues which, the sentiment of loye takes from 
character and circumstance. He allots, for instance, a 
distinct treatment and different object to the rank nisus 
which has root in appetite and to the noble yearning 
which seems as pure as prayer. He makes the brimming 
heart of youth lavish of blind devotion, while the lonely 
steps and sobered hopes of later life are shown to be 
grateful for discriminative sympathy. Again, the 
women to whom Hugo presents us seem able to feel 
love and inspire it. Blanche in the " Eoi s' Amuse " is a 
gentle being swayed by every emotion and alive to all 
kind impulses, resembling, in fact, Tennyson's Elaine. 
You are reminded of Burger's Lenore in the smothered 
fire and dreamy reverie of Spain's German Queen, and you 
feel that Ruy Bias had cause enough to love the gracious 
lady whose delicate sympathy and implicit faith go far to 
ennoble at once his person and his soul. Then, too, the 
betrothed of.Hernani reproduces, warmed, however, and 
softened, the features of Corneille's masterpiece. Both 
are Castilians of blue blood, but Chimene is the typical 
Spanish heroine of whom Calderon might have dreamed, 
Dona Sol the glowing woman whom the courtier-poet 
might nave seen at the court of Philip III. But it is 
especially in the drama of " Angelo " that two winning, 



36 Chats about Boohs, 

though opposite, feminine natures are contrasted with 
striking effect. Had Kodolpho, the hero of the piece, 
been younger in feeling and experience, we are made to 
infer that La Tisbe's sumptuous beauty and magnetic 
vitality would have compelled his worship ; but the spring- 
tide of his youth is past, and her charms are powerless to 
dim the mild image of her rival. Caterina's tenderness 
is veiled by a sweet timidity, and she has the fervor of 
Murillo's virgins, chastened by their perfect modesty. 
But La Tisbe adds lustre to a type which the drama has 
often studied, being one of those erring, but generous, 
women whose faults accuse an ardent temperament 
rather than a perverted heart, misguided certainly and 
evil-starred, but not ignoble — like Adrienne Lecouvreur. 
One does not know whether to envy more the poet or 
the audience who saw such artistes as Mile. Mars and 
Mme. Dorval interpret the heroines of "Angelo." 

We cannot dismiss historical plays without a glance 
at the degree of fidelity with which they reflect the tints 
and texture of their supposed times. "We know it is a 
nice question how far a dramatist should even try to re- 
produce the letter of history. But waiving that, nobody 
will concede to Hugo all the accuracy he claims. In 
"Cromwell," particularly, there are numerous an- 
achronisms and some errors more material. For in- 
stance, a role in the plot is assigned to one Syndercomb, 
who, as it happened, had previously died in prison. 
Again, Hugo makes Carr (Kerr), whom he calls an 
" old sectary," a bigoted partisan of the Long Par- 



Victor Hugo. 37 

liament, and reiterates with some minuteness in the 
notes a statement of the text that in the rebellion of 
1650, " Carr, seconded by Strachan, withdrew his forces 
from the Parliamentary camp." He could scarcely sep- 
arate from that to which he was never attached. It is 
well enough established that this cross-grained fellow, 
Kerr, had raised some regiments in the West of Scotland 
for the Commission of Estates, and refused to join — 
not, of course, the English, whom he was in arms to 
oppose, but — his brother Scots under David Lesly. 
Neither can we like the contrivance by which, in Hugo's 
drama, Cromwell aims to convert his installation into a 
coronation, and filch, as it were, a crown which he had 
already solemnly declined. Such underground proce- 
dure would have galled the man's haughty temper, and, 
irremediably affronted the English people. 

The laborious research which has commonly preceded 
the construction of Hugo's plays demonstrates, how- 
ever, a literary integrity which dramatists rarely dis- 
play, and we have touched some errors of detail only 
because the author asserts in prefaces and notes a punc- 
tilious exactitude to which few historians even can pre- 
tend. It appears to be the privilege of genius, as of roy- 
alty, to lavish large gifts with a careless hand, while it is 
rather the humble acquisitions derived not from nat- 
ure or fortune, but from severe toil, to which they point 
with satisfaction. Thus, Milton dwelt with peculiar com- 
placency on the learning which adorns the ' ' Paradise Ee- 
gained," and the author of " Childe Harold " recalled 



38 Chats about Boohs. 

with especial fondness his dull paraphrase of the " Ars 
Poetica." So much is certain, that in Hugo's dramas 
XJ we breath the atmosphere and glow with the passions of 
their times. He has approached, for example, the great 
Protector in the precise temper of Cromwell's Ironsides, 
a wholesome mixture of naive sagacity and sober admi- 
ration, of candor and respect, equidistant from the 
resentment of Ludlow, the prejudice of Clarendon, and 
the hero-worship of Carlyle. Drawn from such a point 
of view, the portrait is instinct with spirit, and delivers 
. the lineaments of life. Talma, we are told, complained 
to Hugo that he had played warriors and heroes, but 
never a man. Had he lived, he was to have acted 
Cromwell. 

It will scarcely be disputed, doubtless, that the central 
aim of the drama is purely sesthetic. Nevertheless, the 
beauty which a dramatist aims to incarnate may be at 
times a spiritual beauty, a beauty which supposes an ideal 
and implies inward adaptation — in short, a reflex of moral 
perfection. Accordingly the creative power and ethical 
worth of a dramatist will often be found in nice propor- 
tion. If only his art be sufficiently incisive and vera- 
cious he has (perhaps against his will) pronounced a 
sermon. We can discern the intimate relation of art to 
ethics within a certain field by contrasting .Eacine's 
"Phedre" with Victor Hugo's " Lucre ce Borgia." 
Both are fair women and syren-tongued ; both are ca- 
pable of murder and of darker sins ; both invoke sym- 
pathy — let us see which commands it ! Phedre robes 



Victor Hugo. 39 

a brutish appetite in soft and graceful fancies, and 
pushes a yile design behind a mask of sentiment. She 
proposes to atone for a ruthless deed by a tardy compunc- 
tion and to shift the responsibility of guilt by cursing the 
accomplice who has anticipated her secret wish. In the 
treatment of her illicit passion there was manifestly 
much to soothe, and nothing to chafe the conscience 
of Mme. de Montespan. Consequently, the critics of 
Versailles protested that Racine had, so to speak, puri- 
fied Phedre. The truth is, the poet had washed her 
in strong acids — the cleansing kills. The wicked woman 
of Greek tragedy has shrunk to a guilty ghost. Racine, 
no doubt, was a good man as well as a great artist, but 
throughout this piece his method seems to truckle to a 
perverted morality, and unquestionably engenders an 
abortive art. You feel that Phedre's languors and rapt- 
ures are the trappings of a filthy purpose, the weapons 
of cunning desire. And so, in spite of her smooth rhet- 
oric and vehement tears, she is revolting rather than 
pitiable, meretricious and not beautiful. 

At the outset of Hugo's drama, on the other hand, we 
are informed of the Borgia's atrocities, yet from her en- 
trance upon the stage she enlists a measure of sympathy 
— and why ? Not because her beauty captivates some en- 
gaging person of the piece, and so involves an audience 
through a vicarious predilection in the meshes of her 
wiles. On the contrary, from debut to climax she is 
the target of hate and scorn. Neither does the poet 
seek to mask a cancer which he means to burn away. 



40 Chats about Boohs. 

He suffers no contagious gayety to relieve, no persuasive 
plea to extenuate, the sins of her past career. But the 
monster is a mother. Her business in a licentious city 
is to visit an only son, the same wistful solicitude which 
had tracked his steps from youth having led her now 
to Venice to gaze upon his features. The contact with 
the young man's upright and sunny nature seems to elec- 
trify her torpid conscience and to strike like a knife 
at the ulcers of her soul. Eemorse sets in, and her pen- 
itence goes far to cleanse, if it cannot respite. Accord- 
ingly, when the Duchess meets the retribution whose 
shadow is descried from the outset of the piece, we do 
not find ourselves cajoled or tricked into a mawkish 
sympathy, but won to an honest pity. We are made to 
feel in one and the same pang that the wretched woman 
does indeed merit chastisement, but not from a filial hand. 
This would seem to be wholesome art — art tending to those 
summits where poetry and religion walk hand in hand. 
It is strange, considering how often rude and distorted 
versions are presented, that no attenpt has hitherto been 
made to produce on the English stage some of Hugo's 
dramas in translations not unworthy of the poet's text. 
Such an undertaking would be fraught, we think, with 
large enjoyment and profit to the playgoer. Moreover, it 
may almost be pronounced a duty to one who, in our own 
day, has commended to France the aims and methods 
of Shakespeare's art, not as Voltaire commended it — by 
arid critical analysis — but by the fervent and fruitful 
homage of imitation. 



Victor Hugo. 4L 

II. LATER LYRICS. 

Oke of the most charming contributions to recent lit- 
erature is the yolume of poems by Victor Hugo which 
bears the title of " L'Art d'etre Grand-Pere." There is 
something profoundly touching in the spectacle of this 
old man eloquent bending wistfully oyer a cradle and 
sinking the voice which rang out so sternly in " L'An- 
nee Terrible" to the accents of a lullaby. 

Although Victor Hugo is the least impersonal of 
artists, and in his " Contemplations " offered us a sort 
of autobiography, yet the present book was needed to 
show us the man. The generation of readers which 
welcomed his first lyrics has, for the most part, passed 
away, and to their successors these yerses, in which a poet 
grandsire prattles to or dreams oyer his grandchildren, 
will reyeal the fountain of loying kindness in a nature 
which has often seemed surcharged with bitterness. 
Some there are, howeyer, who will be reminded by this 
yolume of earlier lines printed some thirty years ago, 
and in which the hopes and griefs of the parental rela- 
tion are portrayed with the same tender grace and 
poignancy. Indeed, we have found nothing in the 
"Art of Being Grandfather," stored with exquisite 
household idyls as it is, more daintily sweet than two 
poems beginning, " Elle etait pale, et pourtant rose," 
and "Elle avait pris ce pli dans son age enfantin," 
which appeared in the second yolume of the " Contem- 
plations." But when these were penned the author was 



42 Chats about Boohs. 

in the prime of manhood ; the horizon of the artist and 
the patriot was at the widest ; most of his work was yet 
to do, and thus it is not surprising the domestic affec- 
tions should haye claimed less space upon his page than 
we can now see they held in his heart. 

Since the grandfather who here speaks to us is Victor 
Hugo, we should expect the volume to sum up all the 
impressions, memories, and experiences, all the phan- 
toms, smiling or sombre, all the hope and disenchant- 
ment which may abide in the mind of one who has seen 
and accomplished much. Accordingly, in whatever key 
his verse is pitched, however blithe or trivial the text 
may seem, we are presently brought back to the solemn 
drama of human existence — to the problem which, as 
he has said, emerges from the enigma of the cradle to 
culminate in the enigma of the shroud ; which begins 
with a smile, and is continued in a sob. The medi- 
tations, fancies, visions into which we enter, are all in- 
tensely fraught with Hugo's characteristic spirit, yet, 
because the author is a great poet, the reader finds in 
them not a little of his own individuality, and sees re- 
flected the very thoughts with which, surveying the 
dawn of a younger life, he has looked back over his 
own. 

The first part of the present volume seems to have 
been produced at Guernsey during the poet's exile. At 
this time his grandson, George, was not three years, and 
the little girl Jeanne, but fifteen months old. One day 
in summer the children go out to walk with grandpapa 



Victor Hugo. 43 

— Jeanne, however, being in the immediate charge of 
George, who, we are assured, is a perfect little man. 
Such young girls as Jeanne already occupy his mind, 
and he never tires of admiring her diminutive rosy fin- 
gers, and contrasting them with his own stout fists, 
which have battled some three winters with the world. 
Nevertheless, Master George is not unconscious of his 
masculine advantages ; he will j)oint out, now and then, 
to the passers-by the curious fact that Miss Jeanne can 
only creep, while he himself moves with a firm stride, 
and he is likely to shake his head with an air of critical 
disapproval when the young lady thrusts a finger in her 
mouth. George is the guardian of this little sovereign, 
but her subject and slave is grandpapa. On another oc- 
casion, when she is shut up in a dark closet for some 
grave dereliction, the old man goes stealthily to the 
chamber of penance, and slips a pot of sweetmeats 
through the door— a proceeding which naturally pro- 
vokes remonstrance from those domestic powers who 
uphold the public order and security. 

Jeanne often goes to sleep with her little hand tightly 
clutching one of grandpapa's fingers. This is the mo- 
ment the latter chooses for reading conservative news- 
papers, which, as a rule, are not accustomed to treat 
Victor Hugo with much deference. One insinuates, 
perhaps, that the author would be an unpleasant man 
to meet at night in a dark place ; another recites the 
atrocious circumstances under which the poet demol- 
ished the Louvre, and put the hostages to death. A 



44 Chats about Books. 

third suggests that this alleged incendiary, poisoner, 
and assassin might have turned out a less sinister per- 
sonage if the Emperor, Napoleon III., had deigned to 
make him a Minister. While the Bonapartist jackals 
are thus snarling at the majestic exile, his grandchild 
sleeps ; but, as if the dreamer besought him to bear and 
to forbear, he feels the soft pressure of her hand. 

When times haye changed and a new France rises on 
the ruins of the Empire, grandpapa takes his babies to 
Paris and makes known to them that place of wonders, 
the Jardin des Plantes. We are not surprised that the 
sweetest idyls in this volume should have been fashioned 
in this same garden. We can see the aged poet leaning 
on his cane, and watching the fearless motions of his 
innocents, while between the bars, behind which crouch 
the types of cruel instincts, they toss posies and sweet- 
meats, and while the joyous tinkle of their laughter 
blends strangely with a sullen roar, big with wrath and 
with rebellion. Nor are we surprised that, penetrated 
by the poignant contrast thus presented, and longing to 
readjust the seeming inequity of nature, he should have 
been led to reproduce in a passage of singular beauty 
the old theory of the transmigration of souls. 

What, he says, if the antique conjecture, the wild 
dream of Chaldean magians, of Hermes and Pythagoras, 
had, after all, some groundwork of fact ! Wliat if the 
myth of Tantalus did but figure an awful reality — the 
anguish of the brute condemned to live in the presence 
of humanity ! And were it true that these cramped 



Victor Hugo. 45 

skulls, flattened foreheads, distorted and vacant features 
are but the sombre masks of a dethroned intelligence — 
if these beings pent within the tomb of the bestial ap- 
petites, and straining with groans inarticulate to in- 
terpret their torment to our ear, are, indeed, the 
spirits of the damned, expiating on an earth which is to 
them a hell, the crimes of an earlier existence — then 
with what ineffable surprise, with what a shiver of 
awakened hope must these outcasts of creation, forsaken 
of God* and abhorred of man, hear all at once beside 
their prison bars a peal of children's voices ! 

When a grandfather calls himself Victor Hugo — is, in 
other words, not only a poet, but a patriot — he will not 
forget amid his raptures and visions to add a word of 
sober monition. He would not have the young recruits 
of the future begin as he began, with the worship of 
false gods ; and, therefore, in the last section of this 
volume, under the heading, "For the little ones to read 
when they are big," he tells his grandchildren their 
duty, toward France first, and next toward humanity. 
In the outburst of fervor and unshaken constancy 
entitled " Patrie," he bids them know that their grand- 
father was not of those who, seeing ruffians lord it for a 
day, lose heart and confidence in the right. Neither 
was his faith in the fatherland at all disturbed because 
in the reflux of events fate had dealt it another and a 
more fatal Eosbach. In the record of the last hundred 
years you come oftener upon an Austerlitz than a Water- 
loo. But the benignant spirit of the grandsire poet 



46 Chats about Boohs. 

cares not to nourish in these strophes names which are 
so many firebrands of international hate, but seeks to 
instil wider sympathies and a larger purpose than pa- 
triotism can kindle. 

The hundred lines thrown together under the caption 
" Fraternite " contain the whole social philosophy and 
religion of Victor Hugo. His dream, he says, is a peo- 
ple enlightened rather than disciplined ; therefore, he is 
laureate of the loye which wills, the hope which fires, 
the faith which builds — of equity, kindness, pity, long- 
suffering, and a Tast forgiveness. " Oh, brothers," he 
cries, "wind-tossed, waye-tossed, battling for an hour 
in the night and the storm, succor each other, pardon 
each other. " In a world whose to-clay is the inexorable 
outgrowth of yesterday, where the human will dashes in 
Tain against the walls of heredity and environment, it 
may be that the name of Justice is too often on the lips 
of men. Or rather her ministers can never have seen 
her real lineaments, for this is the portrait of the god- 
dess whom we are taught to think stern and blind. 
On a certain day, the poet tells us, he beheld an un- 
known woman who seemed to float out" of a cloud. 
Winged she was, and it seemed that honey was on her 
lips and heaven in her eyes. Now, this woman did 
naught but point out the right road to foot-sore and 
heart-sore wayfarers, and it seemed that her voice said 
only, " Lo ! ye have missed the way." And when he 
drew near, he saw that this woman's eye had blessed 
whatsoever it looked on, so piercing yet mild it was, 



Victor Hugo. 47 

and that this gush and overflow of unstinted, unmeted 
kindness made some to think her crazed. Then he fell 
on his knees and worshipped, for he deemed he knew 
her features. But she, reading his thought, said, sadly, 
" Dost thou, too, know me not ? My son, thou deemest 
me Mercy ; not so, my name is Justice." 

By these gentle words of a poet grandfather, as by the 
solemn tones of " Les Chatiments" and " L'Annee Ter- 
rible," and by his dramas and narratives, no less than 
by his lyric verse, one curious, we might almost say 
anomalous, fact is pressed upon the reader. In all the 
works of Victor Hugo the figure of the author fills the 
foreground, yet, strange to say, the artist is scarcely 
thwarted, but rather aggrandized by the man. We can 
affirm so much of but four names in the history of ar- 
tistic achievement, and the coincidence may well be 
marked that the foremost of living artists is as indis- 
solubly associated with the republican aspirations of 
France, as were his great predecessors with the civic 
liberties of Athens and Florence and with the English 
Commonwealth. The place of Victor Hugo is with 
those patriot poets who challenge the homage, not of 
wonder only, but of a loving reverence by the rare 
accord of a consummate art and an exhaustless sympathy 
with mankind. 

III. "LE PAPE." 

Victor Hugo's book named "Le Pape" seems 
to challenge attention not merely as a poem, but as 



48 Chats about Boohs, 

a manifesto. Indeed, when we note the remarkable 
attitude here taken by the foremost of Hying Badi- 
cals toward the Papacy, we are constrained to over- 
look for a moment the man of letters in the patriot. 
These shreds of verse, half lyric, half dramatic, frag- 
mentary enough and sometimes incoherent, yet fraught 
for the most part with the author's intense and infec- 
tious eloquence, embody an extraordinary suggestion. An 
invitation is extended to the Catholic Church to discard at 
once and forever its profitless league with the monarchi- 
cal and oligarchical principles, to repudiate King and 
Kaiser, who have plundered and betrayed it, to revert 
to the democratic, not to say communistic, spirit of its 
infancy, and to preach, frankly and exclusively, in or- 
ganization and in work, those doctrines of equality and 
fraternity which it once proclaimed, and has at no time 
utterly overlooked. Whether or no this projected al- 
liance between the Papacy and the new democracy is 
purely a poet's dream, we may be assisted presently to 
determine by the concordant hints of a shrewd Catholic 
thinker. At all events, these words of Victor Hugo de- 
serve a thoughtful hearing, even through the medium 
of a prose translation, as the respectful, conciliatory ut- 
terance of a great republican poet, who has been swift 
enough in the past to mark the shortcomings of the Ro- 
man hierarchy. 

In the poem itself, such a reversion on the part of 
Eome to the unselfish teachings which filled the Cata- 
combs, and the strange, scarce thinkable alliance with 



Victor Hugo. 49 

the extreme popular tendencies of the day, are seem- 
ingly relegated to dreamland. It is night. The Holy 
Father is asleep in his "bedroom within the Vatican. He 
dreams ; and, after following his night wanderings, we 
are brought back to the same apartment where the 
poet, as if admitting that his picture had more of long- 
ing than of faith in it, makes the Bishop of Eome mut- 
ter, on awakening, "I haye dreamt a frightful dream." 
But a moment's .reflection suggests that a poet-patriot 
does not giye so much pains to the portrayal of an im- 
possible vision, and that his perception of the function 
which eyents may press upon the Papacy is not unbright- 
ened with a hope of its acceptance. 

In an early scene of this cloud-drama, the Pope, who 
has been striving to spell the lessons of the Creative One 
written in the starry heavens, scans with pitying looks 
the file of monarchs which sweeps past him in august 
similitude of the most Christian and most Catholic de- 
fenders of the faith. We next see him on the threshold 
of the Vatican, about to abandon that stronghold and 
symbol of the old compact between priest and king, and 
go forth like the first Bishops of Rome, those lowly, 
often unlettered, expounders of the gospel of humanity. 
He whom the suffrages of the conclave have placed on 
the throne of St. Peter is represented as speaking in the 
spirit of the primitive propaganda to the city of Rome 
and to the universe. " Listen," he says, " all ye liv- 
ing, shrouded in shadow, led astray by the long impost- 
ure of the slavish centuries : know that thrones are 
3 



50 Chats about Books. 

black, the sceptre vain, the purple yile. Beneath the 
vast sky yonder, impenetrable and mild, love is the only 
purple, innocence the only throne. The night and the 
dawn, two combatants, front each other in the breast of 
man. The priest is a pilot ; he must accustom his eyes 
to the sunlight, if he would whiten his soul. As it is, I 
am blind, like all the rest of you, my friends ; I know 
not man, or God, or any part of the created world ; the 
triple crown about my brow is but a threefold emblem 
of ignorance. I know not why I dwell here in this pal- 
ace, why I wear a diadem, why they call me Lord of 
Lords, Sovereign Pontiff, Heaven-chosen King. This 
thing I know — I am a poor creature. Therefore, I get 
me gone. I quit this palace, trusting that all these 
treasures and this luxury will not curse me for usurping 
them — I, whose roof should be of thatch. Man's con- 
science is my sister, and I go to talk with her. I will 
know no law but to hate evil, without hating the evil- 
doer. Henceforth I will be only a monk, like Basil, and 
like Anthony. I go. I set forth on foot over the earth, as 
chance leads me, into the dawn, into the night ; having 
the wind and the rain for clothing, if it please Heaven ; 
owning nothing but the passing moment ; and mindful 
that the moments are short. I know that man suffers. I 
go to succor the flagging spirit, the drowning heart ; I 
fare amid deserts, amid hovels, among brambles and 
rocks, vagrant even as Jesus, the divine, barefooted way- 
farer. For him who owns nothing, 'tis to gain the 
world, thus to march through the profundities of hu- 



Victor Hugo, 51 

inanity, to heal aching hearts, to prop sinking faith, to 
quicken souls about his path. From kings, then, I seize 
the earth ; to the Eomans I give back Eome ; I go home 
to God's house, which is no other than the lowly house 
of man. Give me way, people ! Eome, farewell ! " 

Now, we cannot shut our eyes to the astonishing vi- 
tality of Latin Christianity, or deny that the Eoman 
Church, shorn of all its temporal possessions, remains on 
the whole the mightiest organization upon the earth. To 
measure the profound and massive foundations of its au- 
thority we need but to compare the influence of the pres- 
ent Pontiff with that of any of the disinherited princes 
whose ancestors have at times seemed to control or com- 
promise the Papacy. The truth is, that in the great re- 
action which followed the German Eeformation, the 
Church of Eome did, in fact, appeal to the masses of the 
people, and since that epoch she has probably lost much 
more than she has gained by her alliance with the mon- 
archical principle. At all events, she must be held to 
have proved her power of self -protection ; she can stand 
alone. She can thrive in a republic, and who will say, 
in view of her origin, and of the successive reversions to 
the spirit of self-abnegation exhibited by the Francis- 
can, Dominican, and Jesuit fathers, that she might not 
adapt herself even to the Utopian commonwealths which 
Proudhon, Louis Blanc, and Karl Marx have contem- 
plated ? But, while we concede to Latin Christianity 
the suppleness and elasticity which belong to living 
tissues, we carmot but recognize the blight of decay and 



52 Chats about Boohs, 

a rigidity which resembles that of death in the Church 
of Eastern Christendom, which connts among its nom- 
inal votaries some 80,000,000 of souls. It is beyond dis- 
pute that both wings of the so-called Orthodox body — 
the Eussian and the Fanariote clergy — are smitten 
through and through with king-worship and the greed 
of carnal things, cursed at once with spiritual apathy 
and intellectual sterility. Accordingly, the reformer 
of Moscow or St. Petersburg is invariably a Nihilist ; he 
can find no place for the Church in a regenerated State ; 
and it would never enter his brain to intrust the Greek 
Patriarch or the Eussian Metropolitan with the role 
which Victor Hugo has assigned in "Le Pape" to the 
Bishop of Eome. The difference in the ductility and 
energy of the Byzantine and Eoman organizations seems 
to foreshadow a very different fate under the pres- 
sure of new social conditions. This wide divergence of 
character and destiny is emphasized in a striking scene 
of the present poem, where the Catholic Church, iden- 
tified in the person of the Supreme Pontiff with the ob- 
scurity, the hardship, and the aspiration of humble 
folk, is brought into sharp contrast with the garish ac- 
cessories and essential nullity of the Eastern hierarchy. 
The Synod of the Orient is in session ; in the place of 
primacy the Patriarch of the East in pontifical robes 
and a tiara on his brow ; around him a throng of Bish- 
ops, their copes and mitres heavy with gold. The su- 
perb prelate has deigned to expound to the awe-struck 
congregation the scope of his apostolate, and has con- 



Victor Hugo. 53 

eluded with pronouncing a gracious benediction upon 
them. To him enters/ pushing his way through the 
crowd of Bishops to the altar, a man clothed in black 
drugget, holding in his hand a wooden cross. " To 
bless Heaven/' cries the new-comer, " is well ; to bless 
hell would be better. Yes, priest/' he explains to the 
astounded prelate, "bless the pains and woes that make 
man's hell. Bless tears ; bless the cankered but repent- 
ant heart where good with evil grapples. Bless hunger, 
rags, the prison where the convict drags his chain ; 
bless the humble soul darkened by perpetual hardship 
and the heart worn out with hope deferred. Bless the 
reprobate, the pariah, all those for whom never yet thou 
didst lift voice in prayer. Bless hell ! " Who is this 
man ? exclaims the Patriarch, and the reply is : 
"Bishop of the Orient, the Bishop of the West salutes 
thee ; I am thy brother." Then follows a remarkable 
dialogue, from which we can cite only the concluding 
lines. The exponent of Latin Christianity, in its im- 
agined mission of fervent co-operation with the laboring 
masses, tells the prelates of the East that he has emerged 
in fear and horror from their night of callous indiffer- 
ence and blind self-seeking. "What!" he cries, "it 
might have been said of me, this man had in charge a 
great idea, the highest and noblest that ever dawned on 
our terrestrial twilight ; he was the organ of the homage 
which the soul owes to Heaven, the one cable of safety 
between a foundering vessel and its port, the one flash 
of light between stumbling man and the abyss of anni- 



54: Chats about Books. 

hilation and despair. What ! because these phantoms 
whom men call lords, princes, sovereigns, Kaisers — 
because false gods made up of accidents, the chance 
of conquest or the chance of birth, chose to come to me, 
the watcher who hath no function here on earth but to 
shout Hosanna, and point with upward finger to the 
soul eternal ; me, whose duty is to ever ponder, amid 
sobs over wrong chastised, how to change God's light 
into God's pity — because these Kings, these shadows, 
these dealers in dust and ashes, come to my door, stern 
and haughty, and bid me do their will, must I therefore 
take their side ? Should it be said that the appointed 
almoner of Heaven had become the broker of these 
slave-merchants, cheapening at their bidding truth, 
honor, justice, law ; filching its rights from a starving 
people to enrich a king; praying for the hand that 
smites, and cursing the head that falls ? Shall it be said 
that I degraded Jesus into Attila's lacquey ? Shall hu- 
manity look me in the face and say, " He had our soul 
in trust and lost it ; the day was dawning and this 
man sold it ; he has prostituted the morning star ? " 
The Patriarch breaks in with, " You blaspheme, Pope !" 
The Pope rejoins, ■" Proud priest, be humble ! Gilded 
altar, quit thy gilding ! August mouth, part thy long 
muzzled lips and speak the truth ! Enter once more 
into thy patrimony, disinherited man ! Women, chil- 
dren, possess rights at last ! People, be conscious of a 
soul ! Come, priests, preach the truths that I proclaim. 
Be lowly of heart ; draw nearer to little children that ye 



Victor Hugo. 55 

may draw nearer unto God. Believe that the meeker 
the Pontiff, his temple is the more sublime. " But these 
verities, like those uttered by St. Paul, are to the 
Greeks but foolishness ; they vanish and leave silence 
around the Roman, who continues : "What, the priests 
fly, the altar falls ; even so Babel crumbled in the 
fore time. I am alone. Nothing left but shadow." 
Then from the far heart of the Infinite a voice whis- 
pers, " I am there !" 

Before passing to those pages in which the Pope of 
Hugo's dream pronounces before a crowd of paupers 
and outcasts and malefactors such an harangue as may 
have been heard from Savonarola in Florence streets, let 
us quote some lines in which the poet suggests a form of 
propaganda with which Catholic priests are by no means 
unfamiliar, and which accounts in a large measure for 
the hold of village curates in France on the affections of 
the rural population. The scene is a garret. It is 
winter. A poor man and his family are huddled to- 
gether, cold and famished, on a straw bed. The poor 
fellow mutters hoarsely: "I do not believe in God." 
The Pope enters, and- with, " You must be hungry, 
eat," divides his slender store of bread, and gives half 
to the father. "And my boy?" returns the other 
sullenly. " Take the whole," then says the visitor, and 
puts the remnant in the child's hand. " How good it 
tastes ! " the boy cries, munching eagerly. " Children 
are angels," says the Pope to the father ; "suffer me to 
bless him." "Do as you will," replies the latter, not 



56 Chats about Boohs. 

very graciously. Then the Pope, emptying his thinly 
garnished wallet on the straw — "Look, here is money 
to buy blankets." " And wood, too," says the poor man, 
softly. "Yes, and to clothe the little boy, his mother, 
and you as well, my brother ; alas ! " the priest con- 
tinues, "'tis a harsh life. I will find you work to do. 
These winter nights are hard to bear. And now let us 
talk of God, my brother." The poor man answers, "I 
believe in Him." 

And this is how the Supreme Pontiff of a younger 
and brighter day may commune with his brethren of 
the streets : " From the depths of night, the depths of 
woe, the depths of tears, come to me, all ye that tremble, 
that suffer, all ye that bleed and ye that sob, the convict, 
the beggar, the incurable, all that know want and 
wretchedness, all that are beaten in life's battle ; I am 
your yoke-fellow, one of yourselves, my bones ache with 
the same fever, I am racked with the same agony. 
Come, ye ragged ones, ye dishonored, ye chastised ones, 
I am the servant of your servitude, the fellow-captive of 
your gaol. I whom they name first among the Kings 
will be the least among you. I love you, and have no 
other excuse for living. I am only a poor creature 
owing service to all. Do ye help me, ye sufferers ! I 
claim my share in the griefs of earth. ye poor, give 
me all you have — your hungry days, your unwarmed 
lofts, your footsore walks, your cares, pains, murmurs, 
angers, your sighs, your prayers, your tears." 

After all, the poet who would carry to such heights 



Victor Hugo. 57 

the gospel of fraternity scarcely goes beyond the teach- 
ings and the acts of St. Francis d'Assisi. This is one 
of the coincidences with historical fact which make it 
impossible to regard this poem as in any sense a satire. 
But before examining in the light of some Catholic 
writings the practicability of the new alliance which 
seems to be commended with so much eloquence to the 
Papacy, we would direct attention to one or two other 
extracts of peculiar interest. In the following passage 
Victor Hugo rebukes distinctly and sternly the excesses 
into which French Radicals have sometimes been be- 
trayed. In view of these lines it is impossible to calum- 
niate the poet by conceiying him as an apologist for the 
bloodshed and devastation which dishonored the last days 
of the Paris Commune. "As to ye/' he says, "work- 
ing men, on whom your burden weighs, ye that own 
the strength of lions, yet whom they treat as ants, I bid 
ye lose not patience, but learn to wait, my friends. 
Shall you come to blows — a trial of main strength ? 
Not so. Certainly it is your supreme right to live, to 
obtain bread to eat, to ask larger wages for less toil 
— so much I concede. The immense universe owes you 
a share of its vast blessings — life, harmony, love, joy, 
hope's aureole. The future is not dark — already morn 
tinges with rose the tiny fingers of the newly-born 
laughing in his crib. Thou shalt claim, workman, 
the guerdon of robust toil, defend thy hearth-stone, yea, 
confront the laws whose false wisdom violates thy simple 

rights. Yet while thou feedest thy child, thou shalt 
3* 



58 Chats about Boohs. 

not slay thy brother, thou shalt not bruise thy father- 
land, or stab thy city. No Saint Bartholomew must 
mar the clear record of your fraternal creed. There is 
no place in the promised land for death. Hope was 
not born to drown in hot, salt tears. Eemorse and 
infamy are not for us ; the people's cause needs no 
butchers. I abhor a red-handed victory, and God's 
paradise would be hateful if we had to enter it across a 
murder. Liberty shall not accept an assassin for her 
instrument. Progress has nothing providential in it if 
it must sound hell in order to scale heaven." 

And now we recall a part of the final scene, in which 
the Holy Father, having striven to fulfil the poet's 
conception of his mission, returns in his last days, not 
to Rome, but to Jerusalem. A sad old man, the time- 
worn comrade of hardship and heartache, the Pope 
draws near to him who revealed here below so much of 
God as may be embraced in man. He surrenders Rome, 
and takes for his abiding place Jerusalem, which, he 
tells us, is the veritable shrine of holiness. The shadow 
of the Christian's faith lies on the Capitol — its soul on 
Calvary. To the throne of Leo and Gregory, the Pontiff 
prefers Christ's sepulchre. For Jesus he forsakes Caesar. 

Those who are disposed to see in the central idea of 
" Le Pape " only a poet's dream, and to regard the co- 
operation, or even the coexistence of the Catholic 
Church with the modern Socialist party as impracticable, 
may do well to compare the suggestions of St. George 
Mivart in the essay entitled " Contemporary Evolution." 



Victor Hugo. 59 

Miyart points out that the eleyation of the artisan class, 
once effected, would put an end to their hostility to the 
Church, since that hostility has mainly arisen from a 
belief that the action of the Church was prejudicial to 
their eleyation. He reminds us too that, although the 
abolition of existing religious orders might be tempora- 
rily enforced, it would be almost impossible to interfere 
with the practice of the evangelical counsels — voluntary 
poyerty, chastity and obedience. Each successive epoch 
of crisis has been fruitful of fresh modes of their man- 
ifestation, some new embodiment of the ascetic spirit 
appearing on the crest of the advancing wave of Chris- 
tian aggression on the world. Hard work and charity, 
under one form or another, were universally obligatory 
upon the old religious orders ; and to this day the 
Trappist works like a day laborer. It may well be, 
then, that manual toil in other forms, and a new mod- 
ification of fraternal charity, will cause religious con- 
gregations to be as heartily welcomed and beloved by a 
Socialist community as ever they were in the ninth, 
thirteenth, or sixteenth centuries. Indeed, a body of 
workmen who should be only distinguished from their 
fellows by a larger spirit of fraternity and a disposition 
to take a greater share of labor from others, while at 
the same time they appropriated a less portion of its 
fruit, would speedily be popular ; and a love for God 
might soon be appreciated when it was seen to be 
.attested by a self-sacrificing love for man. 

Neither St. George Mivart, nor, we imagine, Victor 



60 Chats about Books. 

Hugo, looks forward to any incongruous alliance be- 
tween the Papacy and the Paris Eeds. To the extreme 
revolutionary party in France politics are a religion 
whose cardinal articles are probably held with as much 
intensity of feeling as can be commanded by the Eoman 
Catholic Church itself. Perhaps, if the Church should 
take the line indicated in Hugo's poem, it ought rather 
be regarded as a rival power bidding against the Eeds 
for the friendship of the poorer classes of society. It 
would be quite as little hampered by any stereotyped 
reverence for economical laws. For different reasons 
capital is scarcely less hateful to the genuine ecclesiastic 
than to the Socialist, and we are not sure whether the 
doctrine that property is a trust held for the benefit of 
the needy might not prove quite as attractive to the 
beneficiary as the rival theory that property is only 
legitimate when it has been distributed among the poor. 
At all events, this is the attitude which "Le Pape" sup- 
poses the Catholic Church to have assumed, not so 
much striving to win over its vehement antagonists as 
offering to the great mass of the people, who are as yet 
neither Eeds nor Catholics in any definite sense, a creed 
full of sympathy for their sufferings, yet untrammelled 
with promises which it might prove difficult to perform. 

IV. 

In a notice of " Le Pape " we dwelt on the dual inter- 
est attaching to the utterances of one who is at the same 
time the foremost of contemporary poets and the most 



Victor Hugo. 61 

conspicuous advocate of republican ideas. We find 
the same fusion of aims, the same striking coalescence 
of artist and statesman, in Victor Hugo's later work, 
" La Pitie Supreme. While parts of it undoubtedly 
vibrate with piercing strains of lyrical eloquence, this 
remarkable poem will be naturally regarded in some 
quarters as a political manifesto. From this point 
of view, the singular mildness and benevolence of 
its tone, its exhibition and inculcation of a placable 
and moderate spirit, is a fact of large significance. 
It means that a man of the ripest experience and the 
keenest insight, placed at the focus of affairs, and 
commanding the widest horizon, esteems republican 
institutions impregnably grounded in France ; that, 
in other words, the hour of partisan conflict has passed, 
and the hour of sage and sober counsel has arrived. It 
is the lesson of this poem that class hatreds are anach- 
ronisms, and that the injuries which rankle in the mem- 
ories of many French Eepublicans should henceforth 
be rather studied as historical phenomena than avenged 
as crimes. That such a doctrine should be preached by 
the author of " L'Annee terrible " is of itself a kind of 
revolution. Perhaps nothing that has been said or writ- 
ten in France since the collapse of the empire is more 
calculated to dispel the apprehensions and fortify the 
confidence of friends of order than such a change of 
front on the part of the patriot-poet, who has long been 
ranked with Milton among the most rancorous oppo- 
nents of priest and king. 



62 Chats about Books, 

There are, indeed, some curious points of likeness in 
these two men, whether we consider their relation to the 
literary or the political movement of their times. Both 
evinced in youth some instinctive leanings toward the 
interesting and romantic associations which, to a sensi- 
tive fancy, invest conservative institutions with a spe- 
cies of glamour. Both promptly shook off such illusions 
as the power of insight was quickened and the habit of 
judgment asserted its regnant function. Once become 
republicans by conviction, they were impelled by the 
intensity of the poetic temperament toward sweeping 
reform and headlong revolution. The Long Parliament 
was not progressive enough for Milton ; the Assembly of 
'48 was too slow and circumspect for Victor Hugo. 
Each saw his dream of a commonwealth broken by the 
incubus of Csesarism, and the diverse action of the two 
men in a somewhat similar juncture was dictated by the 
obvious difference of circumstances. However shocked 
and disenchanted by the usurpation of Cromwell, the 
Puritan enthusiast could afford to serve one who was 
himself the outcome of the republican upheaval, who 
upheld, upon the whole, the principles of civil liberty at 
home, and who stood forth the champion of religious 
freedom throughout Europe. The French patriot, on 
the other hand, could not stoop to compromise with a 
sham Caesar, who was to Cromwell what a chicken thief 
is to a pirate, and whose dynastic, religious, political 
and literary credentials were all equally counterfeit. 
The fourteen years which Milton passed in blindness 



Victor Hugo. 63 

and seclusion after his hopes were shipwrecked by the 
restoration of Charles II. may be compared with the 
two decades spent by Victor Hugo in Guernsey, when 
he was, as Swinburne called him, the greatest exile, and, 
therefore, the greatest man of France. It was in these 
analogous periods, when the field of political energy 
was no longer open, that each poet gave himself with 
undivided mind to letters, and produced the works by 
which their names will be longest known. It was not 
giyen, however, to the creator of " Paradise Lost " to 
witness the pacific revolution by which a part of the 
gains won by his republican coadjutors were recovered 
and forever assured to England. More happy than his 
Puritan counterpart, the author of "Les Miserables" 
and "Les Chatiments" lived to see France emerge from 
the slough of political and social corruption, and rear 
once more — and this time on broad and firm foundations 
— the fabric of a free State. If we may trust his own 
estimate of the future implied in the book before us 
he has lived to see those reactionary forces which Milton 
eyed with well-grounded dread and vigilant animosity 
shrink into objects of philosophic review and thoughtful 
pity. 

Kings, nobles, the rich, the lucky, all those who are 
born or drift into splendid opportunities, deserve, we 
are told, compassion rather than envy, and the keenness 
of our sympathy should be exactly proportioned to the 
extent of the temptation. This view of man's surround- 
ings, and of the compensations inherent in social ine- 



64 Chats about Boohs. 

quality, is trite enough, to us, and no doubt it is fa- 
miliar on the lips of village curates in the rural districts 
of France. But we may be sure that it is a strange, 
paradoxical, and repugnant statement to the operatives 
of Paris, Lyons, and the other great cities, who consti- 
tute the vital nucleus of the Eepublican party. As a 
rule, the French artisan has ceased to read the Bible, 
and as yet he has only learned the rudiments of the evo- 
lutionary philosophy. He has acquired the catch-words 
" heredity " and " environment/' and he finds them use- 
ful to explain, as they unquestionably do, the intellect- 
ual shortcomings and the vices of his class. He has 
heard that inherited tendencies to pauperism, drunken- 
ness, insanity, and crime can be checked and gradually 
eliminated in an improved social medium, and he holds 
that every community owes such facilities of melioration 
to all its members. But it seldom occurs to him — cer- 
tainly he is never reminded of it by his spokesmen in 
the Legislature, or by the writers for radical newspapers 
— that the objectionable and odious traits of the once 
privileged classes, of the aristocrat and the capitalist, 
may be easily accounted for by the same simple formula. 
If, given heredity and environment, you have an ex- 
haustive statement of all the factors that evolve charac- 
ter and conduct in the case of the neediest workingman 
portrayed in " L'Assommoir," it can be no otherwise 
with the most opulent and insolent of nabobs, or with 
the most oppressive of autocrats. The naked fact that 
wealth is so seldom employed with the disinterested 



Victor Hugo. 65 

philanthropy of a Howard, or power with the wise be- 
neficence of a Marcus Aurelius, might seem to carry with 
it the proof of specific and irresistible temptations inci- 
dent to such exceptional conditions. But it may safely 
be affirmed that Victor Hugo is the first Eepublican 
leader who has ventured to press home this obvious 
truth to the French Proletariat, and to enforce upon 
them the expediency, the duty, the moral dignity and 
beauty of applying to the excesses and deficiencies of 
their political opponents the same principles of interpre- 
tation and apology to which they appeal on their own 
behalf. 

Victor Hugo does not forget how often he has figured 
in less auspicious times as the passionate denouncer of 
those who sit in the high places, and as the prophet 
of a chastisement to come. In some fervid strophes he 
gives utterance to the inveterate rancor and hunger 
after revenge of those who have suffered too acutely 
from the abuses of power to scan them with the eye of a 
philosopher. " The bitter student of the world," he says, 
"finds himself beset by implacable facts, and crushed be- 
neath the stupendous ugliness of history. Grief-smitten 
by the doleful spectacle of the wave of humanity inces- 
santly shivered on the same reef — wrought to indigna- 
tion and savage rigor by the eternal divorce of right and 
law, by the inexorable triumph of sword and axe — he 
forgets the circumspection and sobriety of the analyst, 
and sees positive turpitude where the patient Darwinian 
would discern nothing but ill-fortune. To such a one 



66 Chats about Boohs. 

the crown is a crime, the right divine of kings a hor- 
rible miasma. For four thousand years, the claim of 
privilege and of authority has racked and strangled man- 
kind. In all those centuries humanity has sobbed and 
ground its teeth, and now that breath is found to curse 
with we must not ask it to pick its words. In the night 
of its infinite anguish we must not expect it to descry a 
ray of extenuation, and, after all, every monarch, what- 
ever history may style him, is but a fold of the vast 
winding sheet in which the gropings and strivings of 
man have been stifled and interred. The best of them 
wring groans, draw blood. Trajan proscribes, Titus 
assassinates ; they are all akin, wolves and lions. While 
the people, in its death agony, swings from the gibbet, 
no strand of the rope can be deemed innocent. While 
the world lies in . irons, each link has its share in the 
crime of the chain. Can there be indeed such a thing 
as a good, an estimable king? 'No,' said Epictetus 
and Plato ; ' No,' said John at Patmos ; and Zeno said, 
' Why, yes ; good kings as there are good axes.' Even on 
the whitest of the Bourbons, on Henry IV., the verdict 
will run, 'He was not a bad man, no, but he was a 
king.' Yea, no kings are good or kind; the statement 
involves a flagrant contradiction in terms ; all are con- 
tained in each, each is implied in all. Let them expiate, 
then, in the detestation of the race the wrong-doing of 
forty centuries. All are branded on the forehead with 
history's bloody hand — imprecations on them all ! " It 
is just here, after thus setting forth the sombre indict- 



Victor Hugo. 67 

ment, that Victor Hugo strikes the key-note of his 
poem. It is precisely this corporate atrocity, he tells us, 
this frightful iteration and universality in the abuse of 
power, which suggested a species of fatality, and shook 
his yengeful purpose by infusing a doubt of responsi- 
bility. "Yes," he goes on, "I find myself smitten 
with a strange inscrutable pity, groaning oyer the un- 
toward fate of kings, doubting whether the austere judg- 
ment of posterity is right, whether history has arrested 
the real culprit, whether these men after all whom we 
dub kings were at bottom worse than others. Is it not 
the fatal air of Borne which engenders the Caesars ? 
Must not Memphis and Thebes continue to -spawn 
Pharaohs so long as the veil of Isis is hung before man's 
reason ? Is it not the tainted atmosphere of the throne 
which begets the Tudor in London, and Belus in 
Babylon ? No human being is born a fiend, begotten 
half flesh, half marble. He who fashioned humanity 
did not plant the tiger, the snake, the rat, in the child 
whose dimpled fingers clutched sweetly its mother's 
gown. No ; if the heart is frozen, 'tis because you your- 
self haye quenched the fire ; if the soul's wing is broken 
you yourself haye bruised and crushed it within a cage ; 
if this or that man is hideous, 'tis because his plastic 
nature has been flung into a mould of deformity and 
crime." 

" After all, whose fault is it," he continues, " that a 
child is born upon a throne ? "What has he done, this 
poor innocent, that he must needs be transformed by 



68 Chats about Boohs. 

the iron force of circumstances into the curse of his 
kind, into the chimera of history, environed by all spec- 
tres' shapes and appliances of horror ? Must he alone 
then, ye thinkers, be condemned for succumbing to his 
environment while you absolve the man-eating Maori, 
the Papuan, the Ashanti, and the Kaffir that washes his 
assegai in blood ? You can pity the gypsy, who knows 
no country, the landless moujik of Muscovy, the ryot 
of Coromandel ; you can find pleas for their shortcom- 
ings — the wolf, the dog, the ass, you say, obeys his in- 
stinct. You can even follow the gaol-bird to his cell, 
measure his skull, spell out his story, and sue for mercy 
to the homicide, the ravisher, and the thief. And can 
you not perceive that the despot is more fatally immeshed 
in the trammels of his surroundings than is the beggar ; 
that his purple robe and the ragged coat are all one in 
the night ; that in the dense shadow wherein man is 
plunged by his brutal instincts, where lies tempt him 
and truth eludes him, he who shares the pauper's igno- 
rance ought to share likewise his excuse ? " 

These are general considerations, whose effect, in the 
author's luminous and vigorous imagery, is, of course, 
very rudely outlined in a prose paraphrase ; bufc they 
are enforced by the portrayal in detail of the apposite 
example furnished by the career of Louis XV. The 
remembrance of the old monarchy still rankles in the 
French people, because its restoration is still the object 
of machinations. And as the one name that commends 
the white flag to France is that of Henry IV., so the name 



Victor Hugo. 69 

of Louis XV. is identified with, all that is most loath- 
some and detestable and formidable in the ancien regime. 
Yet of the whole dynasty, this member owed the least 
part of his execrable offences to heredity, and most to 
his environment. Next to the first Bourbon sovereign, 
he was the most happily gifted of his line that lived to 
fill the throne. It may be doubted whether even his 
kinsman, the Eegent Orleans, had quicker natural 
parts, or had received a more adequate training of 
the intellect. Compared to his great-grandfather, Louis 
XIV., he might be fairly accounted an accomplished 
and even a learned man. So far, too, as his parents 
were concerned, he could have inherited only the wor- 
thiest propensities. His father, the Due de Bourgogne, 
even after we * have made allowances for probable ex- 
aggeration in the report transmitted by obsequious 
biographers, must apparently be accounted one of the 
purest, kindliest, most intelligent, and s high-minded 
beings that ever breathed the sultry atmosphere that 
enfolds a throne, and his mother was a chaste, gentle, 
and winsome woman. So strong, indeed, was the con- 
genital impulse toward a correct and honorable man- 
hood, that the domestic life of Louis XV;, up to the 
age of twenty-seven, was a model of continence and rec- 
titude. But a monarch -who, as a child, had been held 
up in the arms of the old Marshal Villeroy in the face of 
a jubilant metropolis and told " tout ce peuple est a vous, 
Sire," was not likely to forget the noxious lesson when 
superlative seductions assailed his self-control. That 



70 Chats about Books, 

the absolute master of twenty millions of Frenchmen 
should have remained so long an irreproachable prince 
is, indeed, a signal tribute to the sterling fibre of his in- 
herited qualities. That he succumbed in the end, and 
having once asserted his right to self-indulgence, de- 
teriorated with a frightful rapidity, was, as Victor Hugo 
says, well nigh inevitable in the appalling conditions of 
his existence. Nor, remembering the caprices and ex- 
cesses of his busy career, can we doubt that the most 
robust and self-contained of all the Bourbons, that Henry 
IV. himself, would have undergone the same moral 
eclipse had he come earlier to the throne without the 
wholesome discipline of prolonged danger and privation. 
As it was, the secret correspondence lately published by 
the Due deBroglie shows how stubbornly native sagacity 
struggled to exert itself even on the part of the most 
debauched and infamous of French rulers. In the brief 
intervals which satiety imposed on self-indulgence, this 
unhappy Prince bethought himself of his majestic op- 
portunities, and in a fitful, feverish fashion sought to 
vindicate his capacity for higher spheres of kingcraft 
than the mysterious diversions of the Pare aux Cerfs. 
It is in short from this man's tragical experience that 
Victor Hugo deduces his most pertinent and conclusive 
arguments for tolerance and condonation. 

To comprehend and pity the moral gangrene which, 
engendered near the throne, gradually infected the whole 
nation — to excuse the file of titled concubines which, 
beginning with the daughters of Crusaders, sank with 



Victor Hugo. 71 

aDu Barry to a woman of the town — to forgive the 
Pare aux Cerfs, whose wretched inmates were denied 
even the poor solace of protracted and published infamy 
— to overlook the moral debasement, the military hu- 
miliation, the social disintegration, and the financial 
bankruptcy of France — in a word, to fathom, and there- 
fore to pardon, Louis Quinze, — certainly for French 
republicans the demands of philosophy, the austere 
requirements of equity, could no further go. And 
that Victor Hugo has been able to adopt such an at- 
titude toward the most detestable representative of the 
extinguished monarchy is, as we have said, an impres- 
sive voucher for the safety of the re-established com- 
monwealth. To his mind, at all events, the time has 
come for partisan invective to give way to deliberate, 
dispassionate inquiry. Nor will any student of events 
fail to deem it a note of happy promise that we 
should hear the laureate of the republic, whose verse 
throughout fche term of liberty's eclipse breathed only 
wrath and retribution, now grown more sober and more 

mild, 

Retreated in a silent valley sing 

With notes angelical. 



TWO AMERICAN NOVELS. 

Thebe are signs that the American novel will get 
itself written after all. Against the ingenious theories 
which explain its essential impossibility we are now able 
to set an encouraging fact. Notwithstanding the hard 
practical spirit ascribed to our society, the investiture 
of genuine native types with artistic form of a high 
order has of late been twice attempted with creditable 
success. We refer to the treatment of our disparaged 
raw material exhibited in " The American," by Henry 
James, Jr., and in Julian Hawthorne's "Garth." 
These experiments lead us to suspect that what other 
writers lacked was not the inspiration of a romantic 
environment and the stimulus of a highly cultivated 
audience, so much as insight and an adequate command 
of the creative faculty. 

It may be thought that the capabilities of American 
fiction had been already revealed by Mr. Bret Harte. 
But his earlier etchings, remarkable as they were, might 
with some show of reason be pronounced rather hints 
and promises than demonstrations. The short tale is 
to the comprehensive picture of human life what the 
ode is to the epic, or a carved cup to a temple frieze. 
It is not certain that the nimble hand which executes 

the one can compass the other. In the " Sketches by 

72 



Two American Novels, 73 

Boz " we discern the workmanship, but not the power 
of large, organic achievement displayed in " Doinbey 
and Son." Small assurance of " Vanity Fair " lay in a 
" Shabby Genteel Story." It would be folly to set arbi- 
trary limits to the possible accomplishment of the author 
of "The Luck of Roaring Camp," yet it is not the less 
patent that he has not yet written a noyel of extended 
scope. He began one in " Thankful Blossom," but just 
as the stage had begun to fill with characters potential, 
and the plot to acquire breadth and complexity, the 
author seemed to lose heart or will, his hand relaxed, 
and the nascent drama came abruptly to a close. 

It was by short stories, likewise, that Henry James, 
Jr., at first commended himself to American readers. 
During some ten or twelve years he portrayed a large 
variety of scenes, outlined a good many types of char- 
acter, and it was observed that his canvas, although 
narrow, evinced a ripening discernment and a growing 
technical efficiency. These small pictures attested 
several things which rank among the prime qualifica- 
tions of the novelist. Taken together, they betokened 
a wide, patient, and incisive study of men and things 
which seems to have been furthered by a singular lucidity 
of judgment, by sympathies quick and delicate though 
by no means impassioned, and by an agreeable im- 
munity from most kinds of prejudice. They discovered 
a clear perception of the right methods of composition, 
and, what is more to the purpose, an increasing power of 
evolving conceptions through the action and self -utter- 



74 Chats about Boohs. 

ance of his characters. We wish we could haye also 
recognized an equally successful effort to relegate de- 
scription and analysis to functions thoroughly and con- 
stantly subordinate. As regards the instrument of the 
novelist's art, Mr. James seems to haye applied himself 
with deliberate and vigilant pertinacity to the forging of 
an effective style, which, although it bore for some time 
the marks of hammering and tooling, is now flexible, 
elastic, bright. Indeed, his diction, if it wants the af- 
fluence of Lowell's and the delightful grace of Howell's, 
is not inferior to either in aptness said finesse. A charac- 
teristic token of his prose is its aroma of good company, 
and this leads us to note that no American writer has 
depicted with such adequacy and exactitude what is 
known as " society " proper, the social plane which, in an 
aesthetic sense, may be fairly enough called the highest, 
and which, at all events, is the most coveted. With the 
coarser, but seemingly stronger texture, and the rough, 
angular, yet more picturesque surface which belong to 
American life between the Sierras and the Alleghanies 
this writer has given no evidence of personal contact. 
But the proficient in the science of human nature, like 
the adept in biology, can undertake the work of recon- 
struction with very fragmentary materials, and it is safe to 
assume that Mr. James would make the most of such 
types and samples as strayed within his ken. Finally, 
we should say that certain qualities which the English 
masters have taught us to exact of the first-rate novelist 
were but faintly represented in his minor works, and we 



Two American Novels. 75 

shall probably deem their absence the conspicuous short- 
coming in the present performance. But while in some 
respects — in humor, and the piercing, heart-shaking 
pathos which is seldom found divorced from humor — 
neither he nor any other contemporary American can be 
named beside Mr. Harte, yet as regards the average 
technical excellence of his work, and those merits most 
easily communicable by translation, he is perhaps supe- 
rior to the latter. 

In spite of its name, Mr. James's book appears on a 
cursory review not to be an American novel, for the 
scene is laid in Paris, and all the persons of the story, 
with the exception of two clean-cut but merely ancillary 
figures, are French. Some persons may incline to see 
in the book only a careful study of Gallic manners, and 
we are bound to say that, regarded solely from this point 
of view, it is a creditable tour de force. Not that it 
pretends to compass the range of incident and character 
presented in Bulwer's "Parisians," but it offers an ex- 
haustive, realistic, and luminous revelation of the Fau- 
bourg St. Germain, whose counterpart does not exist in 
English, and which we might find it difficult to parallel 
in any living writer of French fiction. Not many of the 
feuilletonistes of the gay capital are supposed to have 
the entree of the noble Faubourg, neither have they Bal- 
zac's power of evolving from his inner consciousness the 
ideas, habits, tastes, traditions of an impenetrable sphere. 
It is indeed a surprising anomaly which our countrymen 
are perhaps less likely to appreciate than are the readers 



76 Chats about Boohs. 

of the Revue des Deux Mondes (to whom by the way 
Mr. James is not a stranger), to find portrayed in an 
American narrative that sequestered Legitimist world 
which every Frenchman in his heart esteems the finest 
and grandest, and of which his native novelists are pro- 
nounced ludicrously ignorant. 

This book, however, is something more than a tour de 
force, something more than a vivid reproduction of the 
most artificial, polished, and fastidious of human socie- 
ties. If there is anything in the law of contrasts — and 
is there not everything in it — what medium so apt as 
this, of such peculiar and consummate fitness, to project 
the central figure of the novel, to emphasize the frank 
defiance of formula and convention, the uncouth, reso- 
lute self-assertion, the rugged individuality of the typi- 
cal American ? We shall acknowledge, no doubt, that 
the hero of the story is in sooth the typical American, 
for although some persons may not account him the 
highest type, yet, if they will turn their eyes away from 
a few seaboard cities and take a candid view of the whole 
country, they will recognize in him the national represent- 
ative type. Happily, too, for the dramatic intensity of 
this narrative he is precisely the person whom well-bred 
Europeans, not having confined their observation of our 
travelling fellow-citizens to the members of the New 
York clubs, persist in thinking the typical American, 
and whom in that capacity they cordially detest. The 
truth is that the author is so determined to sink his hero 
down to the normal and undiscriminated level of our 



Two American Novels. 77 

population that he has positively made him an ex-Briga- 
dier-General of volunteers. 

To introduce this incongruous personage into the core 
of the exclusive Faubourg, to deal with him in such sort 
that he must needs provoke the ineffable disdain and the 
instinctive, unconquerable aversion of its conventional 
refinement, and yet elicit a sympathetic recognition from 
its deeper insight and a loyal esteem from its substantial 
worth ; this, the author's pivotal conception, was bold 
and strong, but the embodiment was plainly beset with 
uncommon difficulties. It would be relatively easy to 
portray, as this writer has elsewhere done, a perfectly- 
bred American whose appearance in a Legitimist salon 
could by no possibility offend, although it might sur- 
prise ; and on the other hand it is quite possible, as Mr. 
Bret Harte has demonstrated, to commend the coarsest 
outlaw of our frontier to the liking of his own coun- 
trymen. But by what continual, yet cautious, shifting 
of standards and measurements, by what subtle inter- 
change of atmospheres, by what deft suggestions and 
shrewd silences shall a reader be made to comprehend 
how one and the same man could justify the love of a 
daughter of the crusaders, and the inveterate repugnance 
and instinctive loathing of her kindred ? In a word, to 
formulate the dilemma from a European point of view, 
the problem was to make a hero of a cad. 

That Mr. James should have found the solution, that 
he should have brought upon the stage a man of mani- 
fest charm and honor and an indubitable cad in the same 



78 Chats about Boohs. 

person, and that neither of the two should have effaced 
the other, constitutes an achievement of no mean order. 
And the merit of the artist is enhanced for us when we 
consider that this juxtaposition of seemingly incongru- 
ous elements is contrived, not in a farce or comedy, but 
in a piece which is essentially a melodrama, over which 
from the outset of the action broods a fatal certainty of 
disappointment. Obviously, the more arduous part of 
such a task was to indicate and yet hold back in shadow 
the superficial traits which rendered the American 
stranger obnoxious to certain members of the house of 
Bellegarde* We cannot stay to mark the adroit touches 
by which the purpose is carried out. It is seldom 
effected by plain statement or by hints too trenchantly 
pictorial ; but we are allowed to guess by arch innuen- 
does and glimpses between the lines that the hero has 
most of the tricks, perversities, and rawnesses of man- 
ner which would particularly chafe a highly refined 
community. "We can perceive that his favorite posture 
is to sit with his nether limbs outstretched at full 
length, or with his feet propped against a railing and 
his chair tipped back on its hind legs. That he is in 
the habit of showering tips on the lackeys of a noble 
mansion, at which he has leave to call. That he is 
quite as ready to laugh at people as smile with them, 
and is not unlikely to break into a loud guffaw in pres- 
ence of the most august personages, as, for instance, of 
that grandest dame of France, the Duchess D'Outre- 
ville ; that he is hopelessly obtuse to those aesthetic de- 



Two American Novels. 79 

lights and discriminations which grow out of familiarity 
with art ; and, finally that his nerves, although un- 
shaken by annoyance or danger, are by no means proof 
against complacency, which, to the unspeakable disgust 
of his entertainers on the occasion of a fete given in his 
honor oozes from him at every pore. In short, "Mr. 
Newman of San Francisco/"' is a man who, if he used 
tobacco in any form, would indisputably chew ; and for 
that reason his. creator will not suffer him even to 
smoke. We may add that this Croesus of the West 
seems to avow with brutal candor his conviction that 
wealth is an all-sufficient passport to society. On the 
other hand, inasmuch as he never names his grand- 
parents to any of his fine acquaintances, the latter are 
perhaps justified in inferring that he never had any. 

These are the impressions produced upon the Marquis 
de Bellegarde by the Western savage, and which the 
hypersensitive reader might be disposed to share if he had 
leisure to ponder hints and make deductions — a proceed- 
ing from which the author is careful to divert him. 
Surface crudities and asperities are not allowed for a 
moment to obscure the essential virility, sweetness, and 
nobility of "the American's" nature, lest we might fail 
to understand the quick appreciation, blossoming at last 
into profound and even passionate regard, which he 
wins from Madame de Cintre, who is certainly a most 
dainty and ethereal creation. We are constantly made 
to see that this imperfectly cultivated stranger is a good 
fellow and a strong man, because all the good people in 



80 Chats about Boohs, 

the book are instinctively drawn toward him, whereas all 
the weak and vicious instinctively avoid him. Neither 
is this unconventional person at all wanting in delicacy 
amid circumstances where experience has taught him 
that another's feelings may be wounded, or where the 
fervor of affection illumines his intellect and informs his 
tact. We should like to quote the characteristic words 
in which this plain, honest man asks the daughter of an 
ancient house to marry him. But we could not give 
them all, and they would be spoiled by mutilation, since 
Mr. Newman was not the sort of person to discourse in 
epigrams. We prefer to cite as indicative of the hero's 
character and attitude toward the lady of his affections, 
and at the same time illustrative of the author's style, 
the following passage : 

Madame de Cintre seemed to him so felicitous a product of 
nature and circumstance that his invention musing on future 
combinations was constantly catching its breath with the fear of 
stumbling into some brutal compression or mutilation of her beau- 
tiful personal harmony. This is what I mean by Newman's ten- 
derness : Madame de Cintre pleased him so exactly as she was that 
his desire to interpose between her and the troubles of life had the 
quality of a young mother's eagerness to protect the sleep of her 
first-born child. Newman was simply charmed, and he handled 
his charm as if it were a music box which would stop if one shook 
it. Certain of Madame de Cintre's personal qualities — the luminous 
sweetness of her eyes, the delicate mobility of her face, the deep 
liquidity of her voice — filled all his consciousness. A rose-crowned 
Greek of old, gazing at a marble goddess with his whole bright 
intellect resting satisfied in the act, could not have been a more 



Tivo American Novels, 81 

complete embodiment of the wisdom that loses itself in the enjoy- 
ment of quiet harmonies. 

There seem to be one or two trivial slips and one 
somewhat more important defect in the management of 
this story. It is not, for instance, made sufficiently clear 
to most readers why the dowager Marchioness of Belle- 
garde should give a great ball by way of announcing 
her daughter's engagement to Mr. Newman, when the 
intention of discarding the latter and replacing him 
with her own kinsman, Lord Deepmere, had already 
taken root in the old schemer's mind. Another objec- 
tion is of more moment. How is it possible that New- 
man, being the man he was, should undertake to coerce 
the relatives of Mme. de Cintre by a threat of publish- 
ing their odious crime ? Waiving altogether the moral 
quality of the act, how could a man possessing the men- 
tal perspicacity ascribed to this American, fail to see 
that, even granted the temporary success of his venture, 
Mme. de Cintre, who intuitively "feared her mother," 
must guess the source of his strange authority, and that 
the knowledge of the secret and of her lover's use of it 
would crush a proud and sensitive heart ? We do not 
say that any avenue of escape from disappointment lay 
open to Newman. We are disposed to think that, given 
the character of the dowager Marchioness, there was 
none. But of sundry futile expedients, one, at all 
events, might have been chosen which should not 
gravely belittle the character of the hero, besides going 
far to rehabilitate, by contrast, his personal enemies. 



82 Chats about Boohs. 

Mr. James has at no time discovered a lively sense of 
humor, or, at all events, the power of interpreting humor 
to his readers. We are less disposed, however, to regret 
the absence of this quality in the present volume, be- 
cause, as we have said, the action turns on more than 
one incident of a tragic or melodramatic nature. But 
we cannot so easily condone a certain constraint and 
frigidity discernible in passages which might be fraught 
with intense pathos. It is probably a consciousness of 
certain shortcomings in this direction which is charge- 
able with one of Mr. James's very few technical faults. 
He is sometimes led to mar a climax, going back to the 
picture and retouching it again and again, as if he sus- 
pected that another might have infused more fervor and 
poignancy. This is true, for instance, of two specially 
impressive scenes — the death bed of Valentin de Belle- 
garde and the final interview of Newman with Madame 
de Cintre. And, generally, it may be said that, in grave 
and moving crises, Mr. James drops too frequently into 
a tone of gentle cynicism, almost of persiflage, as if he 
felt the strain on his sensibilities excessive and intolera- 
ble. So much for qualifying suggestions. It is not the 
less true that this novel, " The American," is a merito- 
rious work of art, and, if we compare it with the writer's 
earlier essays in fiction, an augnry of still riper and more 
highly vitalized achievements. 

It is creditable to American readers that Mr. James's 
story should have won hearty recognition. Yet we are 
constrained to add that another novel has been published 



Two American Novels. 83 

during the present year which deserves an equal, and 
perhaps a larger measure of approval, although it seems 
to have received less. In the first place the narrative is- 
longer, and obviously, provided other conditions are 
equally well satisfied, this circumstance of itself be- 
tokens a more remarkable performance. Before indi- 
cating, however, some of the merits which distinguish 
"Garth," it may be well to ask what is attested by the 
pecuniary success of novels. Of course, on the threshold 
of criticism lies the inquiry, does the book please ; for 
a novel is interesting or it is nothing. But interesting 
to whom ? It is known to booksellers that there has 
never been any great demand for the tales of Poe and 
the elder Hawthorne. Again, the works of Howells, of 
James, even of George Eliot, cannot pretend to vie in 
interest, if circulation be a criterion, with the precious 
piece of inanity current in the United States during one 
brief summer under the name of " That Husband of 
Mine." The essential quality of charm, no less than the 
ancillary proprieties belonging to a work of art — whether 
novel, picture or statue — can only be authoritatively 
affirmed by people of taste, and the question for the mass 
of men must needs be, not whether they like a book, but 
whether they ought to like it. But it must be owned 
that while they are fain to query, what is beauty, they 
will not always stay for an answer. Fielding and Balzac 
find few readers in this country, and it is probable that 
the authors of "The American" and "Garth" must 
content themselves with an esoteric audience. We can 



84 Chats about Books. 

see, nevertheless, that the former story would appeal to 
a somewhat larger class, since there is a more wide- 
spread curiosity touching the doings of a fellow coun- 
tryman in Paris than about his experiences at home. It 
is a fact, too, which we are not called upon to stigmatize 
or justify, that a majority eyen of those cultivated 
Americans who are qualified to enjoy imaginative works 
of a high order, are vastly more interested in a portrayal 
of the Faubourg St. Germain than of a New England 
village. They think they know all about the latter, but 
this is a great mistake. While it is plain, therefore, 
that Mr. James has hit upon a luckier theme, we are by 
no means to infer too hastily that he has made the bet- 
ter novel. 

After all, however, it is inexplicable to us that the 
mass of homely folk who follow with hungry eye the 
dramas of life unfolded in the daily press, should not 
scan such a book as " Garth " with eager interest, just 
as we have heretofore been confounded by a bookseller's 
assurance that the "Gold Bug" and the "Murder in 
the Eue Morgue " are in no considerable request. For 
this story of " Garth " has what so many famous novels 
have wanted, a strong, inscrutable, yet compact and or- 
ganic plot. The plot is intricate, but the intricacy is 
that of a watch, where every spring and wheel, each tiny 
cog and wire, has its nice functions, so that when the 
appointed sum of revolutions is complete the hour strikes 
and the tale is told. Eegarded merely as a piece of 
mechanism, the plan of Mr. Hawthorne's narrative is 



Two American Novels, 85 

scarcely less worthy of dissection than the skeleton of 
" Tom Jones." And when we reflect how many readers 
a dexterous construction of plot, almost his only merit, 
has rallied to Wilkie Collins, we marvel that all seekers 
of sensation have not been tempted to track the windings 
of the strange history set forth in the pages of " Garth." 
The truth probably is that many persons have glanced 
oyer the first chapter of this story, and, finding it filled 
with a description of an old New Hampshire homestead, 
haye put down the book convinced that nothing lay be- 
fore them but a tame, homely record of rural existence, 
where the labors of the plough and the scythe are sup- 
posed to be enlivened by such mild diversions as sleigh 
rides, corn huskings, and maple bees. And yet, if they 
look a little narrowly at this rough-hewn Yankee dwell- 
ing, they would feel that the antique mansion to which 
Balzac gave so many pages of his Reciter die de VAbsolu 
was not more steeped in mystery. So, too, for a careful 
eye the conditions of life amid the New England hills, 
where the same family may have tilled the same farm 
for two hundred years — the immobility, monotony, so- 
briety — seem not unapt to foster those robust, massive, 
gnarled, and angular natures which, once caught in the 
gripe and flame of passion, become the fittest tools of 
tragedy. Poor in incident and rich in individualities, 
such sequestered phases of existence are peculiarly 
adapted to the study of those grave problems which 
deal with the scope and potency of inherited tendencies. 
You notice that it is not in new but in old countries 



86 Chats about Boohs. 

that the simpler sort of folk talk of curses and blessings 
as overshadowing and moulding a joarticular race. Thus, 
in a remote tranquil scene like ,that which Mr. Haw- 
thorne has chosen for his novel, it may well be that the 
pressure of hereditary taint, uncontrolled by any change 
in the environment, would gather momentum till it 
seemed inexorable. 

It is a problem in the difficult equation of heredity and 
environment to which Mr. Hawthorne has addressed him- 
self in the present work. He has discovered that a family 
is a man of larger growth and more complex character, 
yet of individuality not less distinct. " It is young ; it 
grows up prosperous and dies ; its years are generations, 
each one inevitably moulding the next. At last comes 
a year when all its evil is arrayed against all its good." 
As regards the particular family whose record is here 
taken up at the crisis of its history, the author makes 
one of its members say that "the Urmsons have gener- 
ally been worsted by their old Adam ; yet no one of them 
was ever utterly wicked ; " and it is inferred that the de-. 
cisive battle has not yet come off, and that there is still 
a chance to vindicate the inborn angel. But " he, in 
whom the struggle culminates, must be thoroughly Urm- 
son — a compendium of the race — no diluted alien, for 
the more stubborn the devil in him the better worth the 
victory." 

While, however, there runs through the core of this 
book a motif large and serious — for is not the vis major 
of inherited impulse the scientific equivalent of destiny? 



Two American Novels. 87 

— the most frivolous person need not fear that the author 
has indited a philosophical treatise or evinces the slight- 
est pretension to teach anybody anything. His business 
is to please, and if we learn something from him it is 
because no transcript of human life prepared, not with 
the camera's mechanical fidelity, but with the artist's 
finer insight, can want significance. It is certain that 
while this writer has infused into certain scenes the 
weird uncanny charm of which the elder Hawthorne was 
an unrivalled master — while, indeed, the atmosphere of 
" Garth" is " of imagination all compact" — not the 
less do the action and spectacle of the foreground — all its 
persons, incidents, dialogue — belong to the daylight 
world. Take, for instance, this portrait of Garth Urm- 
son ; nothing could be more positive and substantial : 

A broad built young fellow, about twenty-six years of age, but 
looking older, stands on the cloven threshold of Urmhurst, with 
his feet apart and his face bent downward, as though in revery. 
His eyes, however, are rather outlooking than introspective. * * 
Like most Urmsons, Garth is shorter than the average of men, 
but to make up for it he is chested like a bison, and vigorous and 
compact all over. His dress this morning differs little from that 
ordinarily worn by the New Hampshire farmer. His dark, shaggy 
hair pokes itself through the torn crown of a battered straw hat 
which he has clapped on the capacious back of his head. In his 
left hand is a tuft of maple leaves, the splendid scarlet of which 
causes his red flannel shirt to appear dingy by contrast. A rough 
sack coat (the pockets bulging with crimson and yellow apples) 
and corduroy trousers, tucked into cowhide boots, complete his 
costume. 



88 Chats about Boohs. 

Let not the aesthetic person be discouraged by this 
outward integument — Garth Urmson is in reality an 
artist, a painter ; the more narrowly you observed him 
the greater would have been your doubt whether the 
agricultural element was really vital in him at all. His 
hands were certainly not those of a farmer ; their form 
was at once powerful and elegant, and the texture of 
the skin was fine and soft. And where did he acquire 
that firm carriage of the shoulders and that easy pre- 
cision of tread ? Not, surely, from the plough and the 
scythe. And though his features seemed at the first 
glance rugged and almost harsh, they were in fact 
moulded with singular force and meaning, every part re- 
sponding sensitively to his thought. " There was a flavor 
of distinction about him such as is only given by travel, 
thought, and conversation with the world. Admitting 
this, his quiet assumption or resumption of rusticity ar- 
gued a freshness and independence of nature unusual in 
travelled youth nowadays." 

But what is his present destination ; for a man, espe- 
cially a young gentleman of culture, does not plunge into 
pathless forests before breakfast for nothing ? By way 
of answer to this question, and because we should like to 
offer the reader the kernel of the plot, as well as to illus- 
trate a little more adequately the author's diction, we 
give one more citation : 

Let us suppose, then, that while Garth was travelling in Europe 
he met a noble and lovely lady, who, like himself, was a stranger 
there. In the rich heart of the Old World they met, and neither 



Two American Novels. 89 

knew the other, nor was it granted them ever to speak together, or 
to exchange a pressure of the hand ; but once, in a strange room, 
full of antique jewels and precious works of art, their glances had 
met in a crystal mirror, and had read in one another a mutual rev- 
elation. For one deep moment they gazed and knew they loved ; 
then time and space rolled between and parted them. But for 
years thereafter, as they moved along their separate paths, visions 
would rise before them of that unforgotten moment, until at 
length, by much dreaming over it, the event itself began to take 
on the semblance of a dream ; and Garth, returning home, pledged 
himself to another woman, and the lady promised, against her bet- 
ter instincts, to become the wife of another man. Shall our ro- 
mance end here, or shall that picturesque providence which 
watches over her lovers only bring them once more together ere the 
last irrevocable steps that fix their destinies be taken ? Yes, let 
them meet, since all is imagination. 

As we have said, the canvas covered, by " Garth " is 
much broader and more amply peopled than that which 
Mr. James has chosen to fill in " The American." Yet 
the many and diverse figures here brought upon the 
stage all alike bear the impress of the creative faculty. 
{They are men and women, each of them self -prompted 
and self-consistent, so that, given a particular situation, 
the clever reader should foretell unerringly what he or 
she will say or do. But such is the author's fertility of 
invention that the cleverest reader will seldom foresee the 
situation. We must add that one decisive distinction 
will hardly escape those who compare the two novels of 
which we have been speaking. However bright and fas- 
tidious maybe the social world into which Mr. James in- 



90 Chats about Boohs. 

ducts us, it is certain that we moye throughout the 
narrative on a low intellectual plane. His most satisfac- 
tory persons, Madame de Ointre and her younger brother, 
winning as they are, seem of slight texture, narrow of 
brain, and weak of soul, while as for the titular charac- 
ter, we may esteem but cannot fervently admire him ; 
his mental horizon is too contracted ; he is too small a 
man. On the other hand, in Mr. Hawthorne's history, 
while we are not spared that admixture of baseness and 
infirmity which belongs to the mingled skein of life, yet 
in converse with at least three persons we are lifted above 
the common highway of existence to a level of thought 
and purpose on which it is good to dwell. Not that these 
characters are too flawless for human nature's daily food, 
for they are "spirits, too." And therefore it is that 
those persons who concede, not without regret, the truth 
of the picture which Mr. James has drawn, may find no 
small solace in the fact that Garth Urmson, being the 
descendant of a family planted in New England for two 
centuries, has also some claim to be considered a typical 
American. 



SWINBUBNE. 
I. 

By his "Atalanta in Calydon," Mr. Swinburne se- 
cured a place of honor rarely accorded to the first essay 
of any poet. It was the peculiar good fortune of that 
poem to please scholars who were not artists, artists who 
were no scholars, and the general jniblic, which is swayed 
mainly by the melody and emotional fervor of Terse. It 
might have been better for his subsequent reputation 
had his first success been less signal. ^Ye are forced to 
attribute the publication of a later volume — the " Laus 
Veneris " — to a species of intoxication which conceived 
itself exempted from the operation of canons of cleanli- 
ness and decorum. Afterward, however, he produced 
" Erechtheus, a Tragedy," which was in no wise open 
to censure on the score of morality ; and for that and 
other reasons it went far to reinstate him in the j)osition 
which on many grounds he may fairly claim, and 
which nothing but overweening self-confidence or su- 
preme cynicism could have imperilled. 

Since Swinburne has twice attempted to create a veri- 
table Greek tragedy in the uncongenial medium of a mod- 
ern and Northern tongue, Ave are prompted to consider 
the scope and purport of such a performance. Whether 

it falls within a right conception of poetic art, or is es- 

91 



92 Chats about Books. 

sentially a tour de force, and how far it has been par- 
alleled in our literature, are questions that may deserve 
attention after a glance at the poet's general qualifications. 
Few readers probably would concur in the indiscrimi- 
nate eulogy bestowed on Swinburne by the little London 
coterie of which William Morris and the Eossettis were 
conspicuous members. His experiments have been too 
numerous and too divergent to admit of uniform success. 
His narrative poetry, for instance, while illumined with 
bits of vigorous painting, and enlivened here and there 
with bursts of exquisite melody, on the whole wants the 
swiftness, cohesion, and graduated evolution which dis- 
tinguish "Jason, "and the tales rehearsed in the "Earthly 
Paradise." Again, if we look at the etchings of charac- 
ter contained in the volume entitled "Laus Veneris," 
we find no lack of dramatic insight, or historical intu- 
ition — indeed a curiously accurate comprehension of 
certain morbid and anomalous types. But he fails to 
project his figures in crisp outlines, his hand missing 
the sure, clean touch which makes of Browning's 
dramatis personal a gallery of sculpture. It is true that 
the poet's conception of Marie Stuart, which is wrought 
out at great length in "Chastelard" and "Bothwell," 
is distinct and telling. She is portrayed as one of 
those giddy, utterly godless and soulless women, com- 
bining rare accomplishments and vicious instincts, who 
were numerous enough at the Court of Catherine de 
Medicis, and are drawn scarcely less incisively in a 
few rough sentences of Brantome than in Swinburne's 



Swinburne. 93 

elaborate portrait. But while, aside from the two Greek 
tragedies which ought to be ranked in a distinct cate- 
gory, and studied apart from the author's other writings, 
we cannot but recognize some material shortcomings in 
his power of characterization and consecutive develop- 
ment of theme, we are bound to say that his faculty of 
lyrical utterance seems unapproached by any living 
English poet. We might go further, for although 
there is no dearth of unconscious and fitful melody 
among English singers, especially prior to Anne's mis- 
called Augustan age, Swinburne was perhaps the first 
to exhibit a conscious and decisive mastery of the English 
lyre, and to reveal capacities of music in our language 
before unsuspected or denied. 

We are so unaccustomed to define the precise relations 
of poetry to music that the transfer of terms, in current 
criticism, from one art to the other is often ludicrously 
inapt. The smoothness and grace, for instance, which 
studious chiselling and metrical finesse impart to much of 
Tennyson's work is sometimes confounded with melody ; 
whereas the word might as appropriately be applied to 
the Odes of Horace, to which some of Tennyson's minor 
poems present perhaps the nearest English analogues. 
But the Ars Poetica, far from associating poetry with 
music, substantially identifies it with another art, since 
Horace obviously conceives the poet as a painter, manip- 
ulating words for pigments. Boileau, too, in his para- 
phrase of Horace's treatise, expands the same idea, and 
his theory of the poetic function and method has uni- 



94 Chats about Boohs. 

f ormly controlled the practice of his countrymen. What 
is more noteworthy, Lessing, in his "Laocoon," while 
scrupulously marking the boundary line between the 
province and the processes of poetry and those of paint- 
ing and sculpture, appears to ignore its relations to music. 
So rigorously was the pictorial conception of the poet's 
art accepted in England throughout the eighteenth cen- 
tury, until Shelley and Byron resuscitated lyric yerse, 
that it may be questioned whether works like Johnson's 
" London," or even Pope's " Epistles," could, in a Greek 
sense, be called poetry at all. Of lyrics, at all events, 
the Greek notion was very different. Tyrta3us, Pindar 
and the tragic poets in their choruses, were never con- 
ceived as carvers of form or manipulators of color, me- 
diately evoking sentiment through the taste and the 
intellect, but as veritable singers or musicians, working 
directly on the emotions through the musical sense. 
Por example, the famous prelusory burst in the " Aga- 
memnon " has nothing specially pregnant or vivid about 
it, regarded as pictorial expression, but read aloud, even 
with our bastard and tentative pronunciation, it has 
almost the effect of a symphony. How, indeed, would 
it be possible to explain the traditional triumphs of 
Athenian lyric verse among the less cultivated Greeks of 
Dorian stock, the power of Tyrtaeus's songs over the 
Spartans, or of the choruses of Euripides in the mouth 
of captives at Syracuse, except upon the theory that such 
poetry must have hit the senses like a trumpet blast or 
the tones of a flute ? 



Swinburne. 95 

Since, then, the fact could not be gainsaid that lyric 
verse, in one language at least, had been partially iden- 
tified with music, to a certain extent sharing its aim and 
working through its processes, the obvious inference has 
been met by a plea in avoidance. Stress is laid on the 
supposed discrepancy between the Greek and English 
speech in respect of vowel and liquid sounds, and as 
regards the capacity of assonance in general. But the 
truth is that assonance has been nowhere more sedu- 
lously cultivated than in the rude poetry of those early 
English, whom Mr. Freeman will not permit us to call 
Anglo-Saxons ; and Swinburne has proved that it may be 
reinstated in modern English with effective and often 
delightful results. 

Byron undoubtedly did something, and Shelley much 
more, toward restoring melody to English poetry ; the 
one, it would seem, unconsciously, obedient to an in- 
stinct of his ear, the latter deliberately approximating 
at times in aim and method to the Greek conception of 
lyric verse. To Swinburne, however, belongs the credit 
of continually and overtly recognizing that lyric poetry is 
meant for the voice and not the eye, that it is a creature 
of the spoken, not the written tongue ; whereas the dic- 
tion of Dryden and Pope, like the classical Latin, was a 
dead literary language, scanned and conned in the closet, 
never alive upon the lips of men. It is, of course, un- 
reasonable to condemn Englishmen of the last century 
for adopting a notion of poetic methods which to this day 
prevails in Erance, but after reading aloud some burst of 



96 Chats about Boohs, 

song from the " Atalanta," for example, " The hounds 
of spring are on winter's traces," it is hard to control a 
feeling of astonishment and disgust, akin to that pro- 
voked by a Chinese tom-tom, when we turn to our so- 
called heroic couplet with its sorry click of pendulous 
rhyme — mere epigrammatic prose in a metrical strait 
jacket. 

There is scope, unquestionably, for large variety in 
rhyme. There are rhymes consecutive, alternate, peri- 
odic, intercalated; rhymes male, female and polysyllabic; 
but while Swinburne seems to have mastered the whole 
register, he has shown rhyme to be but one species of 
assonance. He has aimed to supplement it with that 
other species — consonance, we might call it — which con- 
sists in the identity of vowel sounds without regard to 
the terminal consonant, and which is thought to 
lend to Spanish poetry a robust and virile harmony. 
There is still another sort employed by Swinburne, bor- 
rowed perhaps from the Anglo-Saxon (for Caedmon's 
poem is full of it), where vowel sounds, not identical 
but accordant, are so placed as to simulate the effect of 
a chord in music. Add to this a right use of allitera- 
tion, which is only undervalued by those who fail to 
recognize its limits. The iteration of initial gutturals 
is, of course, intolerable, and we rarely meet with it in 
Swinburne's work, but the recurrence of liquids and 
semi-liquids is a vital element in the melody of verse. 

While we dwell on the fact, and credit Swinburne 
with discerning it, that harmony must be kept steadily 



Swinburne. 97 

in view as the essential vehicle of poetry, we cannot 
forget that the freightage must be worthy of the vehicle. 
Indeed, Wagner accounts all music worthless unless 
through sense it penetrates the soul, kindling high 
thought and generous emotion. On the whole, Wag- 
ner's conception of an opera accords more nearly with 
the idea of Greek tragedy as it existed in the mind of 
iEschylus, and as it was actually embodied at the Dio- 
nysia, than does our modern notion of a play. It is ob- 
vious that a large measure of lyric power and a right 
conception of its aim and processes are indispensable to 
the creation of dramas like the " Erechtheus." That so 
far Swinburne is better qualified than any living English 
poet to reproduce a lost drama of Euripides, will prob- 
ably appear from the extracts we shall have occasion to 
make. 

The argument of Erechtheus had been treated by Eu- 
ripides in a tragedy no longer extant. The drama before 
us is presented by Swinburne, not avowedly but impli- 
edly, as a substitute for the original play. It is only 
gradually, as we turn the pages of the volume, that we 
appreciate the audacity of his purpose. Can an English 
poet of our day seriously hope to transport the reader 
across the gulf of twenty centuries, behind the curtain 
of mediaeval transformation and modern growth, beyond 
the Christian religion, Eoman civilization, and all the 
pregnant events which have moulded the lives and minds 
of men, to a world whose horizon and atmosphere, creed, 
sympathies, ideals and aspirations were almost totally 
5 



98 Chats about Books. 

alien to the ideas and associations of the present day ? 
How will it be possible to avoid, glaring anachronisms 
(Milton could not, as we shall see), or at all events those 
subtler but equally fatal incongruities of thought and 
sentiment inseparable from the poet's nurture and envi- 
ronment ? Suppose, however, the preliminary step 
gained, that the reader is able to approximate the mood 
of an Athenian at the high festival of the Dionysia, that 
he is seated in the great theatre from whose upper tier 
the eye sweeps across the Long Walls and Piraeus to the 
blue ^Egean and Salamis — yet to what a colossal task 
has the writer addressed himself. ! For of what stuff is 
the play we are to hear ? Will it win the first prize, or 
the third ? Will it show touches of the masters' handi- 
work — a glimpse of the severe majesty of Sophocles, a 
poignant stroke from "Euripides, the human ;" or will 
it prove the botchery of some Ion or Iophon, surviving 
by a foolish chance the wreck of its co-progeny ? Clearly 
it is no light thing to borrow a theme from Euripides, 
and attempt to build upon it a Greek tragedy which 
must infallibly invite comparison with his. In such an 
undertaking absolute triumph is not possible, and 
whether Swinburne has relatively achieved success can 
be best determined after a glance at previous experi- 
ments in the same direction. 

Without including transcripts of Greek plays like 
those which Browning has lately given us — although in 
his case vivid translation is' supplemented by most in- 
cisive and helpful commentary — there would seem to be 



Swinburne. 99 

two ways of writing antique drama, or indeed of repro- 
ducing antique life in any literary form, the mosaic and 
the assimilative. Ben Jonson is an English example of 
the former method. His "Sejanus" and "Catiline" 
are so vigilantly pruned of anachronisms, and follow so 
studiously the text of Latin authorities, that Dryden 
said : "He so represents old Rome to us, that if one of 
her own poets had written the tragedies, we had seen 
less of her than in him." But as might be expected, 
where the mind is intent upon such microscopic work, 
the characterization is feeble, the plays want movement 
and cohesion, and possess about as much vitality as 
Becker's " Gallus." Eacine, on the other hand, although 
he, too, in the " Britannicus " rather piques himself on 
a close adhesion to Tacitus, was careful to inform his 
plays with the modern spirit, making them hinge for the 
most part on the passion of love, which seldom formed 
the pivot of antique drama or played a conspicuous part 
in Greek existence. 

Of the assimilative process, from which alone a pres- 
entation of antiquity, at once accurate and lively, could 
be looked for, we have an instance in Landor. It 
is the distinctive merit of his "Pericles and Aspasia" 
that while it contains scarcely a sentence which can be 
proved to have been uttered by an Athenian, there is 
hardly one which might not have been. Swinburne's 
method is identical with Landor's, and in many re- 
spects the younger poet reminds us of that impracticable 
man who was himself a living anachronism. The most 



100 Chats about Books. 

famous attempt, however, to rear the antique tragedy on 
English soil — and that mainly by a process of assimila- 
tion, although direct translation is interjected here and 
there — is the "Samson Agonistes." It may be inter- 
esting to note some of Milton's happy strokes and 
shortcomings as we follow in detail the course of Swin- 
burne's play. 

The story of the Erechtheus is one of the simplest and 
grandest of Greek myths. Athens, assailed by Eumol- 
pus, son of Neptune and King of Eleusis, is menaced 
with annihilation. Her King, Erechtheus, has been ap- 
prised by the Delphic oracle that his country can only 
be redeemed by the sacrifice of his virgin daughter. The 
maiden consents, dies, and in the battle which follows 
both Erechtheus 'and Eumolpus are slain and Athens is 
saved. In a majestic type the myth incarnates the pas- 
sion of patriotism, the strongest known to the Greek 
breast while Greece was strong, and one, happily for the 
modern poet who has based his play on it, which we are 
able to comprehend. Greek patriotism, however, was 
twofold. The love of race, of the whole Hellenic land 
as opposed to the barbarian world, and especially to that 
Asiatic empire which loomed above the eastern horizon, 
was at certain periods fervent and fruitful, and to this 
Euripides appealed in his "Iphigenia in Aulis." It is 
the narrower but far profounder passion which Swin- 
burne's play is supposed to address — the love of a Greek 
for his own city— above all that of an Athenian for 
Athens, of whose soil he believed himself autochthonous, 



Swinburne. 101 

with whose glory and prosperity his personal happiness 
and pride were indissolubly blended. Such a theme is 
manifestly safer than that of his earlier drama, since it 
was hardly possible to depict effectively the love of 
Meleager for Atalanta without an infusion of modern 
sentiment. It will be found that the tinge of romanti- 
cism which overlaid the classic structure of the former 
piece is scarcely discernible in the present work. 

Erechtheus prologizes. He is discovered alone, invoking 
Earth, of whom tradition declared him son. In curt, 
strong iambics, he discloses the imminent peril of the 
State, and hints shudderingly at the remedy prescribed 
by the Pythian message, and which has yet to be im- 
parted to wife and child. Presently, however, he strikes 
the key note of the piece, and rises above the gloom and 
agony of the hour in a burst of unselfish resolution, which 
voices ringingly the brave, proud spirit of Athenian 
patriotism : 

Mother of life and death and all men's days, 

Earth, whom I chief of all men born would bless 

And call thee with more loving lips than theirs 

Mother, 
******* 

Lo, I stand 
Here on this brow's crown of the city's head 
That crowns its lovely body till death's hour 

Waste it, 
******* 

but now 

Would this day's ebb of their spent wave of strife 

Sweep it to sea, wash it on wreck, and leave 



102 Chats about Boohs. 

A costless thing contemned ; and in our stead 
"Where these walls were, and sounding streets of men 
Make wide a waste for tongueless water-herds 
And spoil of ravening fishes ; that no more 
Should men say, Here was Athens. This shalt thou 
Sustain not, nor thy son endure to see, 
Nor thou to live and look on ; for the womb 
Bare me not base, that bare me miserable ; 
To hear this loud brood of the Thracian foam 
Break its broad strength of billowy-beating war 
Here, and upon it as a blast of death 

Blowing, the keen wrath of a pure-souled king 
******* 
Eumolpus. Nothing sweet in ears of thine 
The music of his making, nor a song 
Toward hopes of ours auspicious, for the note 
Rings as for death oracular to thy sons, 
Full of this charge laid on me, to put out 
The brief light kindled of mine own child's life, 
Or with this helmsman's hand that steers the State 
Run right on the under shoal and ridge of death 
The populous ship with all its fraughtage gone, 
And sails that were to take the wind of time 
Rent, and the tackling that should hold out fast 
In confluent surge of loud calamities, 
Broken, with spars of rudders and lost oars 
That were to row toward harbor and find rest 
In some most glorious haven of all the world, 
And else may never near it. 

While the king is speaking, the chorus of old men too 
weak for war, "gray borderers on the march of death," 
has wound slowly across the stage, and now opens with 



Swinburne. 103 

a doleful prelude contrasting the happy auguries which 
had marked the city's birth with the impending cloud of 
ruin, then drifting back to past calamities which had 
stricken the royal house, and closing with a prayer. "We 
cite several strophes which illustrate the specific merits 
of Swinburne's lyric style : 

A noise is arisen against us of waters, 
A sound as of battle come up from the sea ; 
Strange hunters are hard on us, hearts without pity, 
They have staked their nets round the fair young city, 
That the sons of her strength and her virgin daughters 
Should find not whither alive to flee. 
******** 
Let a third wave smite us not, father, 
Long since sore smitten of twain, 

Lest the house of thy son's son perish 
And his name be barren on earth. 

Whose race wilt thou comfort rather 
If none to thy son remain ? 
Whose seed wilt thou choose to cherish 
If his be cut off in the birth ? 
****** 
But enough now of griefs gray-growing 
Have darkened the house divine, 
Have flowered on its boughs and faded, 
And green is the brave stock yet. 

O father, all-seeing and all-knowing, 
Let the last fruit fall not of thine 
From the tree with whose boughs we are shaded 
From the stock that thy son's hand set. 

If now we glance at the " Agonistes," we shall find 



104 Chats about Books. 

Miltonic vigor in the opening iambics ; but the utter in- 
difference to melody and even rhythmic effect in the 
chorus of what purports to be a Greek play must appear 
unpardonable, and the more remarkable because the 
third book of his great epic abounds in choral passages, 
which, in his own phrase, " voluntary move harmonious 
numbers." The argument of his drama is of course 
familiar. Samson, captive, blind, and now in the prison 
of Gaza, on a festival day, in the general cessation of 
labor, comes forth into the open air, and while he be- 
moans his condition is visited by certain friends of his 
tribe, who form the chorus. In their prelude, by the 
way, occur such incongruities as " Chalyhean tempered 
steel," and a reference to the fable of Atlas, paralleled 
later by allusions to Circe, Tantalus, the Phoenix, and 
other Hellenic mythical persons or legends, which have 
a strange sound in the mouths of primitive Hebrews. 
We quote a few lines from Samson's prologue, and from 
the prefatory chant which follows : 

A little onward lend thy guiding hand 
To these dark steps a little further on ; - 
For yonder bank hath choice of sun or shade ; 

***** I seek 

This unfrequented place to find some ease, 
Ease to the body some, none to the mind 
From restless thoughts that like a deadly swarm 
Of hornets armed, no sooner found alone, 
But rush upon me thronging, and present 
Times past, what once I was, and what am now. 
Oh, wherefore was my birth from heaven foretold 



Siuinlurne. 105 

Twice by an angel ? * * Promise was that I 
Should Israel from PhiJistian yoke deliver ; 
Ask for this great deliverer now, and find him 
Eyeless in Gaza, at the mill with slaves. 
Himself in bonds under Philistian yoke. 

Chorus. 
This, this is he ; softly a while, 
Let us not break in upon him ; 
Oh, change beyond report, thought, or belief; 
See how he lies at random, carelessly diffused, 
With languished head unpropped 
As one past hope, abandoned, 
And by himself given over 
In slavish habit, ill-fitted weeds 
O'erworn and soiled. 

Keturning to Swinburne's tragedy, we find that dur- 
ing the chanting of the chorus, Praxithea, the wife of 
Erechtheus, has come upon the stage. In the dialogue 
which ensues, her husband's reluctance to commuuicate 
the oracle, engenders a species of mystification, where 
the rapid interchange of sententious single lines may re- 
mind the reader of Euripides : 

Prax. What portent from the mid-oracular place 
Hath smitten thee so like a curse that flies, 
Wingless, to waste men with its plagues? Yet speak. 

Erech. Thy blood the gods require not ; take this first. 

Prax. To me than thee more grievous this should sound. 

Erech. That word rang truer and bitterer than it knew. 

Prax. This is not. then, thy grief to see me die? 

Erech. Die! shalt thou not yet give thy blood to death? 

Prax. If this ring worse I know not ; strange it rang. 
5* 



106 Chats about Books. 

At length Erechtheus reyeals the truth, and because he 
cannot bear the sight of his wife's first anguish, leaves 
her alone, to be joined, however, presently by Chthonia, 
the destined offering. Meanwhile the chorus bemoans 
the destiny of both : 

He hath, uttered too surely his wrath, not obscurely nor wrapt as 

in mists of his breath : 
The master that lightens not hearts he enlightens, but gives them 

foreknowledge of death. 
As a bolt from the cloud hath he sent it aloud and proclaimed it 

afar, 
From the darkness and height of the horror of night hath he shown 

us a star ; 
Star may I name it and err not, or flame shall I say, 
Born of the womb that was born for the tomb of the day? 

0, Mght, whom other but thee for mother, and Death for the 

father — Mght, 
Shall we dream to discover, save thee and thy lover, to bring such 

a sorrow to sight? 
From the slumberless bed for thy bedfellow spread and his bride 

under earth 
Hast thou brought forth a wild and insatiable child, an unbearable 

birth. 
Fierce are the fangs of his wrath, and the pangs that they give ; 
None is there, none that may bear them, not one that would live. 

There is nothing in the play more moving than the 
scene that now begins. The mother's mouth cannot 
shape the words that are to acquaint her child with 
death, and she implores counsel of the chorus, "all 
honorable and kindly men of age," but they are dumb. 



SivMurne. 107 

At last waveringly, but gaining heart, as she depicts 
the public danger, and the splendid guerdon of the 
appointed sacrifice, Praxithea speaks : 

Now this third time the wind of wrath has blown 
Right on this people a mightier wave of war 
Three times more huge a ruin ; * * 
* * * * Yet not here, 

Here never shall the Thraeian plant on high 
For ours his father's symbol. * * * 
And if this be not I must give my child, 
Thee, my own very blood and spirit of mine, 
Thee to be slain. Turn from me, turn thine eyes 
A little from me ; I can bear not yet 
To see if still they smile on mine or no, 
If fear make faint the light in them, or faith 
Fix them as stars of safety. Need have we, 
Sore need of stars that set not in mid storm, 
Lights that outlast the lightnings ; yet my heart 
Endures not to make proof of thine or these, 
Nor yet to know thee whom I made and bare 
What manner of woman ; had I borne thee man 
I had made no question of thine eyes or heart 
Nor spared to read the scriptures in them writ, 
Wert thou my son ; yet couldst thou then but die 
Fallen in sheer fight by chance and charge of spears 
And have no more of memory, fill no tomb 
More famous than thy fellows in fair field 
Where many share the grave, many the praise ; 
But one crown shall one only girl, my child, 
Wear, dead for this dear city. 

We pass over several subsequent scenes, which are 



108 Ghats about Boohs. 

occupied partly by the chorus in melancholy retrospec- 
tion and foreboding, and partly by a dialogue of the 
choral spokesman, and afterward of Erechtheus with 
the herald of Eumolpus, the purport of which is to 
announce the final and impending battle. Presently the 
stage is again untenanted, save by the chorus (which of 
course never leaves it), and Praxithea enters with her 
daughter robed for sacrifice. Their farewell, the spe- 
cies of responsive invocation between the chorus and 
Chthonia, which reverberates like a solemn litany, and 
the virgin's death song, appear to us to be fraught with 
so much beauty, that we are impelled to quote again. 
We shall mark, at all events, in this Athenian maid, 
none of that faltering and whimpering which are thought 
to belittle the "Iphigenia" of Euripides. 

Chthonia. 
That I may give this poor girl's blood of mine 
Scarce yet sun-warmed with summer, this thin life, 
Still green with flowerless growth of seedling days, 
To build again my city ; that no drop 
Fallen of these innocent veins on the cold ground 
But shall help knit the joints of her firm walls, 
To knead the stones together and make sure 
The band about her maiden girdlestead, 
Once fastened and of all men's violent hands 
Inviolable for ever, these to me 
Were no such gifts as crave no thanksgiving. 
***** But my heart 
That leaps up lightened of all sloth or fear 
To take the sword's point, yet with one thought's load 



Swinburne. 109 

Flags and falls back broken of wing that halts 

Maimed in mid flight for thy sake and borne down, 

Mother, that in the places where I played 

An arm's length from thy bosom and no more 

Shalt find me never, nor thine eye wax glad 

To mix with mine its eyesight, and for love 

Langh without word, filled with sweet light and speak 

Divine dumb things of the inward spirit and heart 

Moved silently ; * * * * Yet set this thought 

Against all edge of evil as a sword 

To beat back sorrow, that for all the world 

Thou broughtst me forth a saviour who shall save 

Athens ; for none but I from none but thee 

Shall take this death for garland ; and the men 

Mine unknown children of unsounded years, 

My sons unrisen shall rise up at thine hand 

Sown of thy seed to bring forth seed to thee 

And call thee most of all most fruitful found 

Blessed ; * * * * * 

Praxithea. 
Farewell, I bid thee ; so bid thou not me 
Lest the gods hear and mock us ; * * 

* * * * Thee, child, 

I help not, nor am holpen; fain, ah fain, 
More than was ever mother born of man, 
Were I to help thee ; fain beyond all prayer, 
Beyond all thought fain to redeem thee, torn 
More timeless from me sorrowing than the dream 
That was thy sister ; * * now but once 
I touch, but once more hold thee, one more kiss 
This last time, and none other evermore 
Leave on thy lips and leave them. 
* * * * This breast once thine 



110 Chats about Boohs. 

Shall rear again no children ; never now 
Shall any mortal blossom born like thee 
Lie there, nor ever with small silent mouth 
Draw the sweet springs dry for an hour that feed 
The blind, blithe life that knows not ; never head 
Rest here to make these cold veins warm, nor eye 
Laugh itself open with the lips that reach 
Lovingly toward a fount more loving : * * 
****** 

Then follows a heart-shaking interchange of invoca- 
tions between the gray-headed men of the chorus, and 
the girl who gives her life for them and their fair city. 

Chthonia. 
O city, glory of Athens, crown of my father's land, farewell. 
Chorus. 
For welfare is given her of thee. 

Chthonia. 

Goddess, be good to thy people, that in them dominion and free- 
dom may dwell. 

Chorus. 
Turn from us the strengths of the sea. 
* * * * * * # 

Chthonia. 
crown on .the world's head lying 

Too high for its waters to drown, 
Take yet this one word of me dying, 

city, crown ; 
Though land-wind and sea-wind with mouths that blow slaughter 

Should gird them to battle against thee again, 
New-born of the blood of a maiden thy daughter, 

The rage of their breath shall be vain. 



Swinburne. Ill 

For their strength shall be quenched and made idle, 
And the foam of their mouths find a bridle, 
And the height of their heads bow down 
At the foot of the towers of the town. 
Be blest and beloved as I love thee 

Of all that shall draw from thee breath ; 
Be thy life as the sun's is above thee : 

I go to my death. 

We cannot follow the progress of the play — we will 
not stay to recall the affecting picture of the maiden's 
sacrifice, the tumultuous storm song of the chorus 
which surges between hope and doubt while the distant 
battle is waging, or the ultimate triumph announced by 
a herald, and his account of Erechtheus's death, which 
ranks- among the most forceful descriptions within our 
knowledge. "We have space only for the closing words 
of Athena, which aim to comfort the desolate queen, and 
for the concluding choral song. In order that the 
reader may appreciate the worth of Swinburne's work 
in the difficult field of antique drama, we will once 
more place him side by side with Milton . 

The finale of the " Agonistes " is commonly accounted 
the strongest portion of the work. Samson is dead, and 
with him half the nobles of Philistia. The edifice 
where all were met to see him, the blind hero pulled 
down upon their heads and his own. The closing words 
are put in the mouth of Manoah, his father : 

Come, come ! no time for lamentation now, 

Nor much more cause ; Samson hath quit himseLf 



112 Chats about Boohs. 

Like Samson, and heroically hath, finished 
A life heroic, on his enemies 

Fully revenged, hath left them years of mourning 
And lamentation to the sons of Caphtor 
Through all Philistian bounds ; to Israel 
Honor hath left and freedom, let but them 
Find courage to lay hold on this occasion. 
****** 

Chorus. 
All is best, though we oft doubt 

What the unsearchable dispose 
Of highest wisdom brings about 

And ever best found in the close. 
Oft he seems to hide his face 

But unexpectedly returns 
And to his faithful champion hath in place 

Bore witness gloriously ; whence Gaza mourns 
And all that band them to resist 

His uncontrollable intent ; 
His servants he with new acquest 

Of true experience from this great event 
With peace and consolation hath dismissed 

And calm of mind all passion spent. 

And now let us see how our younger poet concludes a 

tragedy : 

Athena. 

Hear, men that mourn, and women without mate, 
Hearken : ye sick of soul with fear, and thou 
Dumb-stricken for thy children ; * * * 

* * * I p a n a s bring thee word, 
I virgin daughter of the most high god 
Give all you charge and lay command on all 



Swinburne. 113 

The word I bring be wasted not ; for this 
The gods have 'stablished and his soul hath sworn 
That time nor earth nor changing sons of men 
Nor waves of generations, nor the winds 
Of ages risen and fallen that steer their tides 
Through light and dark of birth and lovelier death 
From storm toward haven inviolable, shall see 
So great a light alive beneath the sun 
As the aweless eye of Athens ; * 

* * • * In thine hand 
Shall time be like a sceptre, and thine head 
Wear worship for a garland ; nor one leaf 
Shall change or Winter cast out of thy crown 
Till all flowers wither in the world ; thine eyes 
Shall first in man's flash lightning liberty, 
Thy tongue shall first say freedom ; thy first hand 
Shall loose the thunder terror as a hound 
To hunt from sunset to the springs of the sun 
Kings that rose up out of the populous East 
To make their quarry of thee, and shall strew 
With multitudinous limbs of myriad herds 
The foodless pastures of the sea and make 
With wrecks immeasurable and unsummed defeat 
One ruin of all their many-folded flocks 
111 shepherded from Asia. * * * 

Chorus. 

From the depth of the springs of my spirit a fountain is poured of 
thanksgiving, 
My country, my mother, for thee, 
That thy dead for their death shall have life in thy sight and a 
name everliving 
At heart of thy people to be. 



114 Chats about Boohs, 

In the darkness of change on the waters of time they shall turn 

from afar 
To the beam of this dawn for a beacon, the light of these pyres for 

a star ; 
They shall see thee who love and take comfort, who hate thee 

shall see and take warning, 
Our mother that makest us free ; 
And the sons of thine earth shall have help of the waves that made 

war on their morning, 
And friendship and fame of the sea. 

The reader will now determine for himself whether 
the re-creation of Greek tragedy in an alien and awk- 
ward speech should be scouted as a chimera, or be ac- 
counted a legitimate work of art. In aesthetic questions, 
the conclusive test and seal of legitimacy is yictory. It 
appears, at all events, indisputable that certain themes 
of universal and perennial power — the conception of 
self -devotion for humanity or kindred embodied in the 
" Prometheus" or the " Agonistes," and that of self- 
immolation for country portrayed in the "Erechtheus" 
— in spite of the strange and ill-intelligible treatment 
exacted by the conditions of antique drama, the obscure 
myths, metaphors, points of view, and turns of thought 
inseparable from its texture, somehow contrive to hit 
the heart. The latest experiment of Swinburne presents 
no unworthy semblance of a Euripidean play. It has, 
at least, demonstrated the possibility of suggesting to 
the modern eye and ear, by example more forceful than 
the most eloquent description, what manner of work it 



Swinburne, 115 

was which knit the heart of Greece to the Attic stage, 
what and how those 

Lofty, grave tragedians taught 
In chorus or iambic, teachers best 
Of moral prudence with delight received 
In brief, sententious precepts ; while they sang 
Of fate, and chance, and change in human life, 
High actions and high passions best describing. 

II. 

The lyric poems collected under the title of Songs of 
the Springtides cannot fail to signally enhance Mr. 
Swinburne's reputation. Both as regards form and con- 
tents, they constitute a splendid and conclusive voucher 
for his claim to the foremost rank among contemporary 
English singers. In view of these exquisite composi- 
tions, no one henceforth, we imagine, will challenge the 
author's right to occupy a place of honor which Shelley 
alone is entitled to share with him among the modern 
masters of the English lyre. 

That Mr. Swinburne has carried the development of 
rhythm and melody to a pitch of elaborate refinement and 
manifold beauty, not only unattained but unconceived 
before in English verse, had been already demonstrated 
by his /previous performances. But there have been 
signs in certain quarters of an attempt at subtle dispar- 
agement by a perfunctory recognition of bis skill in the 
technics of assonance and metre, coupled with the im- 
plied suggestion that higher and more spiritual gifts 



116 Chats about Books. 

were less adequately attested in his poetry. Such vague, 
insinuated slurs were somewhat hard to meet, because 
although abundant proof of profound insight and of 
the strongest sweep of the imagination could be drawn 
from his works, there were also, undoubtedly, scattered 
through his writings, snatches of song which touched 
the strings of merely f ugitiye emotion, and which did 
not aim to strike the deeper chords of feeling or to sound 
the wells of thought. Most of the lyrics, however, pre- 
sented in this yolume are fraught of larger, richer, more 
enduring tissues ; they are weighted with great thoughts, 
and instinct with high passions ; they breathe a purity, 
an eleyation, a nobility of sentiment which, without 
pedantic exaggeration, may at times be termed Pindaric. 
Whatever may be said of some earlier and shorter nights 
by which the author tried his wing, there is no question 
here of voluptuous tinklings and soft Lydian airs, of 
carnal hankerings and gross delights ; the song is lifted 
far above the paltrinesses and the impurities of earth, 
and poises with steady plume in the cool empyrean. In a 
word, the beauteous body which Swinburne's poetry al- 
ways had is here informed with a soul. 

By far the loftiest strains which have come for many 
a year from any English singer are to be found in the 
" Birthday Ode " addressed to Victor Hugo, which fills 
a considerable part of the present volume. It is this 
remarkable work to which we would especially direct 
notice, but before scrutinizing it in some detail we would 
pause a moment over two of the charming lyrics inserted 



Swinburne. 117 

in another poem, "The Garden of Cymodoce." The 
first is a description, or rather an invocation, of the 
Island of Guernsey, which the poet calls " the loveliest 
thing that shines against the sun," set, as it is, "mid- 
most of the murderous water's web, all round it stretched 
and spun," and which "laughs reckless of rough tide 
and raging ebb." Only the artist in metre is likely to 
appreciate the consummate mechanism of this compo- 
sition, but every ear attuned to music can feel the 
beauty of the rhythmic beat and the charm of an asso- 
nance subtler than that of rhyme. 

flower of all wind-flowers and sea flowers, 

Made lovelier by love of the sea 
Than thy golden own field-flowers, or tree-flowers 

Like foam of the sea-facing tree ! 
No foot but the sea-mew's there settles 

On the spikes of thine anthers like horns, 
With snow-colored spray for thy petals, 
Black rocks for thy thorns. 

Was it here, in the waste of his waters, 
That the lordly north wind, when his love 

On the fairest of many king's daughters 
Bore down for a spoil from above, 

Chose forth of all farthest far islands 
As a haven to harbor her head, 

Of all lowlands on earth and all highlands, 
His bride-worthy bed ? 

Presently the poet reminds us that this fairest of isl- 
ands hung like a " flower or jewel on the deep soft breast 



118 Chats about Boohs. 

of the sea," was for long years the home of one whom he 
has elsewhere called "the greatest exile, and therefore 
the greatest man, of France ; " of that patriot poet, 
proscribed after the crime of December, and whose 
" God-like, banished gaze turned," we are told, "from 
its goal of natural days and homeward hunger for the 
clear French clime toward English earth." In a second 
song, which yoices the associations suggested by the 
refuge which Guernsey gave to Victor Hugo, the author 
returns to a scheme of melody, an example of which he 
published fifteen years ago, under the name of "Bo- 
coco." After apostrophizing the island as "throned 
with the world's most perilous sea for throne, and 
praised from all its choral throats of thunder," he con- 
tinues thus : 

Yet one praise hast thou holier, 

Than praise of theirs may be, 
To exalt thee, wert thou lowlier 

Than all that take the sea 
With shores whence waves ebb slowlier 

Than these fall off from thee : 

That One, whose name gives glory, 

One man whose life makes light, 
One crowned and throned in story 

Above all empire's height, 
Came, where thy straits run hoary, 

To hold thee fast in sight. 

The ode written for the anniversary festival of Victor 
Hugo, February 20, 1880, is a work of extended scope, 
containing five hundred and twenty lines, and whether 



Sivindurne. 119 

we regard it from an artistic or intellectual and moral 
point of view, must be counted among the performances 
by which Mr. Swinburne will longest be remembered. 
As regards structure, it is framed with the nicest accu- 
racy on the most admired Greek models, but so sure yet 
delicate is the author's touch, so close are the joinings, 
so felicitous the breaks, so apparently spontaneous the 
transitions and recurrences, that the reader's recognition 
of the study and effort implied in the artificial arrange- 
ment is not awakened for a moment. So smooth and 
limpid is the current of the verse, so naturally do its 
bend and gush seem to obey the changeful impulse of 
emotion, that not one reader in a hundred is likely to 
detect the technical super-excellence of the work, or real- 
ize that beneath the even and lustrous surface lies a vast 
amount of tireless experiment and matchless skill ; that 
we have here, in fact, a marvel of dexterity in the trans- 
fer to an alien and reluctant tongue of the most intricate 
and perfect metrical product transmitted by the Hellenic 
masters. That the substance of the poem is worthy of 
its garb will probably be demonstrated to the reader as 
we transcribe a series of passages in which the central 
motive or individual charm of Victor Hugo's multitudi- 
nous creations is succinctly outlined. We shall confine 
ourselves to the poet's allusions to the dramas and ro- 
mances with which the American readers of Victor Hugo 
are most familiar. 

Here, for instance, the pivotal situation of Hernani is 
painted in four lines : 



120 Chats about Bootes. 

Before the storm-blast blown of death's dark horn 
The marriage moonlight withers, that the morn 
For two made one may find throe made by death 
One ruin at the blasting of its breath. 

The next four sketch the groundwork of " Marion de 
Lorme," who, in the first copy of the piece, was made to 
say that " L 9 amour m 9 a refait ma virginitc ;" 

Clothed with heart's flame renewed 

And strange new maidenhood, 

Faith lightens on the lips that bloomed for hire 

rare as the lightning of love's first-born fire. 

In the following the reader will recognize the root idea 
of "Lc Roi s'amuse," that ghastly tragedy in which the 
jester Triboulet, thinking to wreak a frightful chastise- 
ment on Francis I., finds his own hand has murdered the 
beloyed child whose seduction he intended to avenge : 

Wide-eyed and patient ever, till the curse 
Find where to fall and pierce, 
Keen expiation whets with edge more dread 
A father's wrong to smite a father's head. 

In the six lines which succeed Mr. Swinburne alludes, 
of course, to that strong drama of " Marie Tudor," which 
is to Tennyson's treatment of the same theme as is red 
wine to water : 

As red the fire-scathed royal Northland bloom 

That left our story a name 

Dyed through with blood and flame 

E'er her life shriveled from a firier doom 



Swinburne. 121 

Than theirs her priests bade pass from earth in fire 
To slake the thirst of God their Lord's desire. 

In the two lines that ensue, namely : 

As keen the blast of love-enkindled fate 
That burst the Paduan tyrant's guarded gate, 

there is an obvious reference to the drama of ' ' Angelo," 
animated and illumined by the striking figure of "La 
Tisbe." "With like incisive brevity the poet indicates 
the wretched fate of the luckless Esmeralda : 

As sad the softer moan, 

Made one with music's own, 

For one whose feet made music as they fell 

On ways by loveless love made hot from hell. 

Next the author outlines, in few words, the culminat- 
ing situation of Ruy Bias, when, after frustrating the 
vile project of Don Salluste and saving the honor of the 
Queen, the hero of the piece seeks the one refuge left 
from a fatal complication : 

But higher than these and all the songs thereof 

The perfect heart of love, 

The heart by fraud and hate once crucified 

That dying gave thanks, and in thanksgiving died. 

Although it is seldom acted, there is no doubt that 

what maybe called the trilogy of "The Burgraves" is 

one of the most massive and precious works of Hugo. 

The stage is crowded with strong types, from the august 

figure of Barbarossa to the slave woman who has nursed 
6 



122 Chats about Boohs. 

the dream of vengeance through two generations. What 
reader, too, is not impressed by the sharpness with which 
the author has brought out the swift decadence of 
German society in the thirteenth century through the 
concrete examples of grandsire, sire, and son ? Hardly 
less striking is the felicity with which Hugo has relieved 
the strain upon the sterner emotions by introducing an 
idyl of youth and love whose mild gleams nicker in the 
shadow of sombre and ferocious passions. On "The 
Burgraves " Mr. Swinburne dwells at greater length : 

Above the windy walls that rule the Rhine 
A noise of eagles' wings 
And wintry war-time rings, 
"With roar of ravage trampling corn and vine 
And storm of wrathful wassail dashed with song ; 
And under these the watch of wreakless wrong, 
With fire of eyes anhungered ; and above 
These, the light of the stricken eyes of love, 
The faint sweet eyes that follow 
The wind-ou twinging swallow, 
And face athirst with young wan yearning mouth 
Turned after toward the unseen all-golden south, 
Hopeless to see the birds back ere life wane, 
Or the leaves born again ; 
And still the might and music mastering fate 
Of life more strong than death and love than hate. 

We come now to the terse, thought-laden lines in 
which, as in a bejeweled catalogue, Mr. Swinburne 
enumerates the studies of human life that, under the 
form of novel or romance, Victor Hugo has given to the 



Swi?idurne. 123 

world. Here, again, a line or two expresses* the quintes- 
sence of the thing described. We may take for example 
the reference to "Notre Dame de Paris/' which we can- 
not but esteem a nearly perfect realization of that 
almost impossible ideal, the historical noyel : 

Higher than they rose of old, 

New builded now, behold 
The live great likeness of our Lady's towers, 

And round them like a dove 

Wounded, and sick with love. 
One fair ghost moving, crowned with fateful flowers, 
Watched yet with eyes of blood-red lust 
And eyes of love's heart broken and unbroken trust. 

The next allusion is to the broad canvas of "Les 
Mis6rables," which portrays so many of the characteristic 
features and propounds so many of the problems of our 
modern civilization : 

Nor less the weight and worth 

Found even of love on earth 

To wash all stain of tears and sins away, 

On dying lips alit, 

That living knew not it 

In the winged shape of song with death to play; 

To warm young children with its wings 

And try with fire the heart elect for God-like things. 

For all worst wants of all most miserable 

With divine hands to deal 

All balms and herbs that heal 

Among all woes whereunder poor men dwell, 

Our Master sent His servant Love to be 

On earth His witness. 



124 Chats about Boohs. 

In the lines which immediately follow the poet marks 
the psychological subject treated by Victor Hugo in the 
" Toilers of the Sea." 

But the strange, deep sea, 

Mother of life and death inextricate, 

What work should Love do there to war with fate ? 

Yet there must Love to keep 

At heart of the eyeless deep 

Watch, and wage war wide eyed with all its wonders. 

Lower than the lightnings of its waves, and thunders 

Of seas less monstrous than the births they bred ; 

Keep high there heart and head, 

And conquer : then for prize of all toils past 

Feel the sea close them in again at last. 

The lines that succeed outline the central thought 
embodied in " L'Homme qui rit : " 

A day of direr doom arisen thereafter 

With cloud and fire in strife 

Lightens and darkens life 

Round one by man's hand masked with living laughter, 

A man by men bemonstered, but by love 

Watched with blind eyes as of a wakeful dove 

And wooed by lust, that in her rosy den 

As fire on flesh feeds on the souls of men. 

To take the intense impure 

Burnt offering of her lure, 

Divine and dark and bright and naked, strange 

With ravenous thirst of life reversed and change, 

As though the very heaven should shrivel and swell 

With hunger after hell. 



Swinburne, 125 

Run mad for dear damnation, and desire 

To feel its light thrilled through with stings of fire. 

And here we see interpreted the dominant, abiding 
impression left on the reader's mind by the latest of 
Victor Hugo's novels — " Quatre-vingt-treize :" 

Above a windier sea, 

The glory of Ninety-three 
Fills heaven with blood-red and with rose-red beams 

That earth beholding grows 

Herself one burning rose 
Flagrant and fragrant with strange deeds and dreams, 
Dreams dyed as love's own flower, and deeds 
Stained as with love's own life-blood, that for love's sake bleeds. 

In words equally succinct and searching, quivering 
with a like sympathy and suffused with the same glow 
of passionate admiration, Mr. Swinburne runs over the 
whole list of Victor Hugo's remarkable achievements. 
Looking back at last over the expanse, so wide as to 
seem incredible of " one great man's good works," and 
beholding in him not alone the many-sided prince of 
letters, but a leader in the advance of men made better 
through harsh trial and steadfast aspiration, he sums up 
what he deems the august significance of such a life in 
terms of noblest eulogy. He calls him " the mightiest 
soul," 

That came forth singing ever in man's ears 
Of all souls with us, and through all these years 
Rings yet the lordliest, waxen yet more strong, 
That on our souls hath shed itself in song, 



126 Chats about Boohs. 

Poured forth itself like rain 

On souls like springing grain 

That with its proereant beams and showers were fed 

For living wine and sacramental bread ; 

Given all itself as air gives life and light, 

Utterly, as of right ; 

The goodliest gift our age hath given, to be 

Ours while the sun gives glory to the sea. 

The ode from which we have made these quotations 
ends with an apostrophe whose simplicity and dignity 
fall on the reader's ear like the deep notes of a diapason. 
If we except the invocation to Athena, which concludes 
the tragedy of Erechtheus, we must discern in the lines 
which follow a conscious majesty/ coupled with a heart- 
thrilling reverence, without a parallel in the poetry of 
our time. They constitute the fitting capstone of an 
incomparable monument: 

Our Father and Master and Lord, 
Who hast thy song for sword, 
For staff thy spirit, and our hearts for throne ; 
As in past years of wrong, 
Take now my subject song, 
To no crowned head made humble but thine own ; 
That on thy day of worldly birth 
Gives thanks for all thou hast given past thanks of all on earth. 

We cannot take leave of this volume without noting 
the stern words in which Mr. Swinburne utters his indi- 
vidual protest against the projected interment of the 
son of Napoleon III. in Westminster Abbey. With what 



Swinburne. 127 

undying hate republicans should regard that Second 
Empire which has proved an accursed blight to France, 
and how little it behooves the sons of liberty-loving 
England to bestow misplaced honor and a sickly sym- 
pathy on any of the brood of Bonaparte the poet had 
pointed out in " The Garden of Cymodoce," from which 
we quote a specially pertinent passage : 

But when our master's homeless feet were here, 

France yet was foul with joy more foul than fear, 

And slavery chosen, more vile by choice of chance 

Than dull damnation of inheritance 

From Russian year to year. 

Alas fair mother of men, alas my France, 

What ailed thee so to fall, that wert so dear 

For all men's sake to all men, in such trance, 

Plague stricken ? Had the very gods that saw 

Thy glory lighten on us for a law, 

Thy gospel go before us for a guide, 

Had these waxed envious of our love and awe ? 

Or was it less their envy than thy pride 

That bared thy breast for the obscene vulture claw, 

High priestess, by whose mouth Love prophesied. 

That fate should yet mean freedom ? Howsoever, 

That hour, the helper of men's hearts, we praise, 

Which blots out of man's book of after days 

The name above all names abhorred for ever. 

It is not strange that the author of these lines should 
feel himself irresistibly impelled — in view of the anom- 
alous distinction offered to the hereditary representative 
of Bonapartist plots and crimes by the Dean of West- 



128 Chats about Boohs. 

minster — to relieve his conscience from a sense of public 
duty in the following sonnet : 

" Let us go hence." From the inmost shrine of grace 
Where England holds the elect of all her dead 
There comes a word like one of old time said 

By gods of old cast out. Here is no place 

At once for these and one of poisonous race. 
Let each rise up from his dishallowed bed 
And pass forth silent. Each divine veiled head 

Shall speak in silence with averted face ; 
" Scorn everlasting and eternal shame 

Eat out the rotting record of his name 

Who had the glory of all these graves in trust 
And turned it to a hissing. His offence 

Makes havoc of their desecrated dust 
Whose place is here no more. Let us go hence." 

Such are the accents of austere truth and compressed 
scorn with which a republican poet denounces the pro- 
posed desecration of Westminster Abbey by the erection 
of a monument to the son of Napoleon III. Such an act 
Mr. Swinburne would denounce as " an insult at once to 
contemporary France, and to the present only less than 
to past generations of Englishmen." 

III. MAET STUAET. 

Ik the tragedy called Mary Stuart by Algernon Charles 
Swinburne, we have the concluding member of the tril- 
ogy of which the preceding parts were " Chastelard " and 
" BothwelL," and in which the author has undertaken to 



Swinburne. 129 

depict one of the most enigmatic and interesting per- 
sons that have lived upon this earth. That this play, 
like its predecessors, was not intended for the theatre is 
sufficiently obvious, though we would not venture to 
affirm that if its long speeches underwent the process of 
lopping and pruning to which Victor Hugo's " Bur- 
graves" was subjected, it might not be presented effec- 
tively upon the stage. No part, however, of this dra- 
matic poem was written, we may be sure, with a view to 
any such mutilation ; the play was intended to be read, 
not seen, like " Philip Van Artevelde," or Browning's 
essays in the field of dramatic poetry. The author has 
sought, as we have said, to render lifelike and intelligible, 
one of the strangest figures in the strange sixteenth cen- 
tury ; to interpret at once the fascinations and the short- 
comings of one who embodied all the weaknesses and all 
the charms of the Eenaissance, who united an admira- 
ble alertness of the intellect to an exquisite sensitiveness 
to all forms of beauty, but in whose consummate egoism 
there seems to have been no place for altruistic senti- 
ments or for the moral sense. Those who are conversant 
with the private lives of high-placed men and women in 
the Italy of the fifteenth and the France of the sixteenth 
century, know that characters quite as problematic as 
that which Mr. Swinburne has portrayed in the Scottish 
Queen were continually encountered at those epochs. 
Mary Stuart's mother-in-law and sister-in-law, Cathe- 
rine de Medicis and Marguerite de Valois, were women 
of the same type, and there is no indication in the me- 
6* 



130 Chats about Boohs. 

moirs of Brantome and other contemporary writers that 
the fusion of supreme attractiveness and total heartless- 
ness exhibited in those instances was regarded as any- 
thing exceptional. There was about the court of 
Francis I., of his son, and of his grandchildren, an at- 
mosphere of self-indulgence and moral obliquity such as 
Mr. Mallock would have us think will again pervade the 
higher sphere of society, should agnosticism succeed in 
displacing religion. 

In the trilogy which ends with the present poem, Mr. 
Swinburne has performed a remarkable achievement by 
putting an end to the idle controversies touching the 
criminality of the Queen of Scots — controversies raised 
for the most part by persons who have known little of 
the influences under which Mary Stuart was brought up 
— and by assisting us to understand the a|)parent incon- 
sistencies of her conduct, the crimes and the acts of 
baseness at which she must be held to have connived, 
and the inexhaustible devotion which she inspired to 
her last hour. This task, which was carried far toward 
completion in "Chastelard" and " Both well," and 
which exacted an immense amount of antiquarian re- 
search, directed and illuminated by a poet's insight, 
and by what Oomte chose to call the historical con- 
science, is finished in this tragedy. The author has also 
aimed in the play before us to tell the truth about Eliza- - 
beth, to show the so-called maiden Queen as she was 
known to her contemporaries, to strip her of the prepos- 
terous attributes with which her flatterers endowed her, 



Swinburne. 131 

and which have been transmitted to our day through the 
hero-worship of Charles Kingsley and other light-headed 
enthusiasts. It is, by the way, a curious fact that 
Swinburne's veracious portrait of Elizabeth should have 
appeared almost at the same time with a careful study of 
the Queen's character based on contemporary correspond- 
ence. We refer to the series of papers entitled "Les 
Projets du Mariage d'une Eeine d'Angleterre," written 
by M." Hector de la Ferriere for the Revue des Deux 
Mondes. Nothing could be more grotesquely unlike the 
popular impression of Elizabeth, or more thoroughly 
consonant with Mr. Swinburne's conception, than the 
picture drawn by M. de la Ferriere, in which we are 
•made to see the selfish, peevish, vain, jealous, amorous 
daughter of Henry VIII.,, as she really appeared to 
courtiers and ambassadors. What is more extraordi- 
nary, the letter supposed to have been written by Mary 
Stuart, and whose delivery to Elizabeth causes the tragic 
culmination of this play, has been shown by M. de la 
Ferriere to be actually extant in the archives of the 
Marquis of Salisbury. We can perhaps demonstrate in 
no better way the historical accuracy of Mr. Swinburne's 
portrait of Elizabeth than fyy prefacing some extracts 
from the poem, with an account of what is actually 
known about the letter on which the action is made to 
turn. 

It is well known that Catherine de Medicis endeavored 
to bring about a marriage between the Queen of Eng- 
land and one of her sons, and that after Charles IX. and 



132 Chats about Boohs. 

Henri III. had been successively rejected by Elizabeth, 
she sought to substitute their younger brother Francois, 
commonly known as the Due d'Alencon, but who, on 
the accession of his brother Henri to the throne, became 
Due d'Anjou. M. de la Ferriere shows us that Fran- 
cois entered eagerly into his mother's scheme, and in 
February, 1575, sent an envoy to England to press his 
suit. For this purpose he selected the master of his 
wardrobe, one Jean de Simier, whose origin seems to 
have been obscure (and who is therefore aptly desig- 
nated in the letter as the Duke's "knave"), but who, 
according to a contemporary writer, was " un courtisan 
raffine qui avoit une exquise connoissance des gaites 
d'amour et attraits de la cour." It is certain that Sim- 
ier gained Elizabeth's favor, and that his relations with 
her became so intimate as to occasion great scandal at 
the English court. When, a few months afterward, 
the Due d'Anjou came to England, it was observed that 
Elizabeth had a room prepared for him next her own, 
and that she frequently passed her days and evenings 
alone with him, the Due not leaving her private cham- 
ber until two hours after midnight. It was the conduct 
of Elizabeth with the Due and with his envoy Simier 
on which Mary Stuart dilated in a letter which she 
penned in an hour of ungovernable anger, and which 
Mr. Swinburne supposes to have been delivered at a 
critical moment when Elizabeth was hesitating to sign 
the warrant for her rival's execution. In this letter, 
according to M, de la Ferriere, Mary Stuart rebuked 



Swinburne. 133 

Elizabeth for her vices, in language which he thus 
translates, and which will be found to justify the ex- 
pressions used by Mr. Swinburne : " Je prencls Dieu a 
temoin que la Comtesse de Shrewsbury m'a dit que yous 
ayiez engage votre honneur avec un etranger, allant le 
trouver dans la chambre d'une dame la ou yous le baisiez 
et usiez avec lui de privautes deshonnetes, mais aussi lui 
reveliez les secrets de royaume, trahissant tos propres 
conseillers avec lui." In the same letter wherein Mary 
thus taunts Elizabeth with her intimacy with Simier, she 
denounces her similar indiscretions with Simier's mas- 
ter, the Due. Her words are thus reproduced in French 
by M. de la Ferriere : " Yous yous etes deportee avec lui 
de la meme dissolution qu'avec Simier ; une nuit yous 
l'avez rencontre a la porte de Yotre chambre, n'ayant 
que Yotre seul chemise ct Yotre manteau de nuit, et yous 
1'aYec laisse entrer, et il est demeure avec yous pres cle 
trois heures." We are told by M. de la Ferriere that 
this letter was copied by Prince Labanof from the origi- 
nal, which is in the handwriting of Mary Stuart, and is 
now in the possession of the Marquis of Salisbury, who 
has, of course, inherited the papers of Elizabeth's chief 
counsellor, Lord Burleigh. This document, plainly, sug- 
gests a very different conception of Elizabeth's charac- 
ter from the popular notion to which Shakespeare gave 
utterance when he discoursed on the high-souled virgin 
whose days were passed "in maiden meditation, fancy 
free." "We shall see, as we proceed with Mr. Swin- 
burne's poem, that Elizabeth's rage on reading the let- 



134 Chats about Boohs. 

ter above mentioned wants the accent of virtuous indig- 
nation, and reveals rather the fury and spite of an un- 
masked hypocrite who discovers that her secret vices are 
known to a bitter enemy, and who hastens to suppress 
an inconvenient witness. 

In the present play we have the closing scenes of 
Mary Stuart's life, beginning with Babington's conspir- 
acy, and ending with her trial and execution for com- 
plicity in the intended murder of Elizabeth. This plot 
was peculiarly formidable because it was formed among 
the gentlemen in immediate attendance on the English 
Queen, and was aimed not merely at her deposition, but 
at her life. The drama opens at the moment when their 
plans are ripe, and Babington has convoked his accom- 
plices at his lodgings. The words in which Babington 
announces the prompt fulfilment of their purpose are 
obviously suggested by the language which Shakespeare 
puts into the mouth of the Duke of Gloster : 

Babington. Welcome, good friends, and welcome this good day 
That casts out hope and brings in certainty 
To turn raw spring to summer. Now not long 
The flower that crowns the front of all our faiths 
Shall bleach to death in prison; now the trust 
That took the night with fire as of a star 
Grows red and broad as sunrise in our sight 
Who held it dear and desperate once, now sure, 
But not more dear, being surer. 

Babington, as the event proved, was an imaginative 
but weak-hearted braggart, who, when subjected to tor- 



Swinburne. 135 

ture, tried to lay the guilt of the conspiracy on the 
shoulders of his comrades. He was one of Mary Stuart's 
many tools, unconsciously made such by her incompar- 
able fascination.' The species of witchery which she 
could exercise at will is reyealed in the following passage, 
in which he justifies the heat he displays in her service : 

Look you, sirs, 
This is no new thing for my faith to keep, 
My soul to feed its fires with, and my hope 
Fix eyes upon for star to steer by ; she 
That six years hence the^boy that I was then, 
And page, ye know, to Shrewsbury, gave his faith 
To serve and worship with his body and soul 
For only lady and queen, with power alone 
To lift my heart up and bow down mine eyes 
At sight and sense of her sweet sovereignty, 
Made thence her man for ever ; she whose look 
Turned all my blood of life to tears and fire, 
That going or coming, sad or glad — for yet 
She would be somewhile merry, as though to give 
Comfort and ease of heart her servants, then 
"Weep smilingly to be so light of mind, 
Saying she was like the bird grown blithe in bonds 
That if too late set free would die for fear, 
Or wild birds hunt it out of life— if sad, 
Put madness in me for her suffering's sake, 
If joyous, for her very love's sake — still 
Made my heart mad alike to serve her, being 
I know not when the sweeter, sad or blithe, 
Nor what mood heavenliest of her, all whose change 
Was as of stars and sun and moon in heaven. 



136 Chats about Boohs. 

Several of 'the persons in this opening scene are skil- 
fully discriminated, and Mr. Swinburne makes us see 
that the soul of the plot is not the romantic and self- 
yaunting Babington, but a Jesuit priest, who, when the 
conspirators are arrested, refrains from cowardly accusa- 
tions of his companions, and, like Iago, goes silently to 
his doom. In the remainder of the first act the scene 
is shifted from London to Chartley, where the Queen of 
Scots is a prisoner under the ward of Sir Amyas Paulet. 
Just as Mr. Swinburne sought to show us from the lips 
of Babington what Mary Stuart seemed to be, so now 
we are helped to see her as she really was through her 
unguarded communings with her tirewoman. The lat- 
ter, Mary Beaton, is the link which binds this play to 
the first member of the trilogy, for she has never for- 
saken the Queen through the long years of captivity, 
while, on the other hand, she has never forgotten Chas- 
telard, and has more than once been tempted to avenge 
him. The instrument of vengeance is in her hand, for 
the letter in which Mary Stuart had taunted Elizabeth 
with her dishonorable passion for Simier and the Due 
D'Anjou had been given to Mary Beaton. Subsequently 
Mary's prudence led her to regret this hasty and perilous 
step, and she ordered it to be burned. Mary Beaton, 
however, keeps it, and being wrought, as we shall see, 
to uncontrollable indignation and anger by the pitiless 
egoism of her mistress, and by the proof that the very 
name of Chastelard is forgotten by the woman for 
whom he died, sends the fatal document to Elizabeth at 



Swinburne. 137 

a moment when the life of Mary Stuart hangs on a 
thread. In this first scene at Chartley Mary speaks as 
follows of Elizabeth, and alludes to the letter she sup- 
poses to be destroyed : 

I am yet some ten years younger than this queen, 

Some nine or ten ; but if I die this year 

And she some score years longer than I think 

Be royal-titled, in one year of mine 

I shall have lived the longer life, and die 

The fuller-fortuned woman. Dost thou mind 

The letter that I writ nigh two years gone 

To let her wit what privacies of hers 

Our trusty dame of Shrewsbury's tongue made mine 

Ere it took fire to sting her lord and 'me ? 

How thick soe'er o'er curfed with poisonous lies, 

Of her I am sure it lied not ; and perchance 

I did the wiselier, having writ my fill, 

Yet to withhold the letter when she sought 

Of me to know what villainies had it poured 

In ears of mine against her innocent name : 

And yet thou knowest what mirthful heart was mine 

To write her word of these, that had she read 

Had surely, being but woman, made her mad, 

Or haply, being not woman, had not. Faith, 

How say'st thou ? did I well ? 

In the same scene there is another characteristic refer- 
ence to Elizabeth by Mary, who hints that she believes 
not only the scandals reported by the Countess of Shrews- 
bury, but the other current rumor which imputed steril- 
ity to her rival. Mr. Swinburne seems to accept both 
stories as not inconsistent with each other, and perhaps 



138 Chats about Books. 

they are not, either on physiological or psychological 
grounds : 

Mary Stuart. I would not be so tempered of my blood, 
So much mismade as she in spirit and flesh, 
To be more fair of fortune. She should hate 
Not me, albeit she hate me deadly, more 
Than thee or any woman. By my faith, 
Fain would I know, what knowing not of her now 
I muse upon and marvel, if she have 
Desire or pulse or passion of true heart 
Fed full from natural veins, or be indeed 
All bare and barren, all as dead men's bones 
Of all sweet nature and sharp seed of love, 
And those salt springs of life, through fire and tears 
That bring forth pain and pleasure in their kind 
To make good days and evil, all in her 
Lie sere and sapless as the dust of death. 
I have found no great good hap in all my days 
Nor much good cause to make me glad of God, 
Yet have I had and lacked not of my life 
My good things and mine evil" : being not yet 
Barred from life's natural ends of evil and good 
Foredoomed for man and woman through the world 
Till all their works be nothing and of mine~ 
I know but this — though I should die to-day, 
I would not take for mine her fortune. 

Mary Beaton. No ? 
Myself perchance I would not. 

Mary Stuart. Dost thou think 
That fire-tongued witch of Shrewsbury spake once truth 
Who told me all those quaint foul merry tales 
Of our dear sister that at her desire 
I writ to give her word of, and at thine 



Swinburne. 139 

Withheld and put the letter in thine hand 
To burn as was thy counsel ? 

After dwelling on the offensive details of the letter in 
language substantially accordant with the quotations 
above given from the version of M. de la Ferriere, Mary 
Stuart concludes by saying that she believes the slanders, 
and had made her belief manifest to the reader of the 

letter : 

God wot, 
Had she read all, and in my hand set down, 
I could not blame her though she had sought to take 
31 y head for payment : no less poise on earth 
Had served, and hardly, for the writer's fee ; 
I could not much have blamed her ; all the less, 
That I did take this, though from slanderous lips, 
For gospel and not slander, and that now 
I yet do well believe it. 

The act closes with the abrupt removal of Mary from 
Chartley to Tixall, and her detention in the latter place 
while her papers arc ransacked for proof of her conniv- 
ance at Babington's treasonable project against the life 
of Elizabeth. Xo documents are found, but her secre- 
taries, being arrested and put to torture, acknowledge 
that they wrote at her dictation some letters which im- 
plied full knowledge of his purpose. The proof, how- 
ever, is incomplete, and both for this reason and because 
instinct tells Elizabeth that the trial and public execu- 
tion of a queen is a dangerous precedent, she is minded 
to put her rival out of the way privily, and sounds one of 
her council, Walsingham, touching the expediency of as- 



140 Chats about Boohs. 

sassination. Walsingham at heart cares more for the 
supremacy of English laws than for the theory of royal 
dignity and immunity, and insists that Mary Stuart shall 
be tried for treason against the realm of which she is a 
resident. The spiteful and treacherous character of Eliz- 
abeth is indicated by some subtle and acrid strokes which 
we would willingly reproduce. But we must confine 
ourselves, for the most part, to the scenes in which Mary 
Stuart and the agent of retribution, Mary Beaton, per- 
sonally figure. In the second act we see them both again 
at Chartley, to which they haye returned, and Mary 
Beaton is informed by their jailer, Sir Amyas Paulet, of 
her mistress's aj)proaching trial and too probable con- 
demnation. Left alone for a few moments, Mary Bea- 
ton reveals in a soliloquy the key to her action in the 
tragedy. We quote her words at length, as exhibiting 
the pivotal motive of the drama : 

Here looms on me the landmark of my life 
That I have looked for now some score of years 
Even with long-suffering eagerness of heart 
And a most hungry patience. I did know, 
Yea, God, thou knowest I knew this all that while, 
From that day forth when even these eyes beheld 
Fall the most faithful head in all the world, 
Toward her most loving and of me most loved, 
By doom of hers that was so loved of him 
He could not love me nor his life at all 
Nor his own soul nor aught that all men love, 
Nor could fear death nor very God, or care 
If there were aught more merciful in heaven 



Swinburne. 141 

Than love on earth had been to hira. Chastelard, — 

I have not had the name upon my lips 

That stands for sign of love the truest in man 

Since first love made him sacrifice of men, 

This long sad score of years retributive 

Since it was cast out of her heart and mind 

Who made it mean a dead thing; nor, I think, 

Will she remember it before she die. 

* « w * * * # 

Yet my soul 
Knows, and yet God knows, I would set not hand 
To such a work as might put on the time 
And make death's foot more forward for her sake ; 
Yea, were it to deliver mine own soul 
From bondage and long-suffering of my life, 
I would not set mine hand to work her wrong. 
Tempted I was — but hath God need of me 
To work his judgment, bring his time about, 
Approve his justice if the word be just 
That whoso doeth shall suffer his own deed, 
Bear his own blow, to weep tears back for tears, 
And bleed for bloodshed ? 

Tempt me not, God. My heart swelled once to know 
I bore her death about me ; as I think 
Indeed I bear it. 

In the third act takes place the trial of Mary Stuart 
in Fotheringay Castle. In his account of the trial Mr. 
Swinburne adheres closely to the extant records of that 
remarkable proceeding in which, as is well known, Mary 
Stuart bore herself with admirable dignity, and, al- 



142 Chats about Boohs. 

though unprovided with legal assistance of any kind, 
defended herself with great ability. She begins by ex- 
cepting to the jurisdiction of the court, and then pro- 
ceeds to sift and comment on the evidence alleged 
against her. But notwithstanding the skill which Mary 
exhibited in her defence, and the want of any decisive 
evidence in her own handwriting, the judicial commis- 
sion found her guilty of treason, and sentenced her to 
death. It was still uncertain, however, whether Eliza- 
beth would sign the warrant for her execution, and in 
the fourth act her counsellors try in vain to secure her 
signature. She remembers, doubtless, that while sover- 
eigns had more than once been removed by clandestine 
means in England, yet none had ever publicly suffered 
the death penalty for the violation of English laws. Nor 
will it probably be disputed that Charles I. would never 
have been tried and executed but for the precedent 
which Elizabeth had countenanced in the case of the 
Queen of Scots. Mr. Swinburne makes it manifest that 
the arguments of Burleigh and Walsingham — based, as 
they were, on the assumption, extremely distasteful to a 
Tudor, that the laws of the realm were binding even 
upon a sovereign — served rather to intensify than over- 
come the reluctance which Elizabeth intuitively felt. 
The English queen falls back again on her scheme of 
assassination, and an agent is sent to Eotheringay to 
work upon Sir Amyas Paulefc, who proves, however, no 
less intractable on this head than Walsingham. It is at 
this time that Mary Beaton learns of Elizabeth's hesita- 



Swinburne, 143 

tion, and how improbable it is that the warrant will be 
signed. At such a juncture it is evident that the letter 
in her possession will turn the scale, but before sending 
it she is prompted by a merciful impulse to ascertain 
whether her mistress feels any twinge of remorse fcr 
her treatment of Chastelard, for haying suffered him to 
die when a word from her might have saved him. Curi- 
ously enough, Mary Stuart is represented as remember- 
ing some words uttered by Chastelard in loving but sol- 
emn warning, yet when Mary Beaton tries to lead her 
mind back to their author it turns out that she has for- 
gotten even his name. 

Mary Stuart. I know not : yet 

Time was when I remembered. 

Mary Beaton. It should be 

No enemy's saying whom you remember not ; 
You are wont not to forget your enemies ; yet 
The word rang sadder than a friend's should fall 
Save in some strange pass of the spirit or flesh 
For love's sake haply hurt to death. 

Mary Stuart. It seems 

Thy mind is bent to know the name of me 
That of myself I know not. 

Mary Beaton. Nay, my mind 

Has other thoughts to beat upon : for me 
It may suffice to know the saying for true 
And never care who said it. 

For a time Mary, dwelling on the past, glances at other 
incidents, but presently her mind returns to Chastelard's 
prediction, which, though uncoupled with a name, still 



14A Chats about Boohs. 

lingers in her memory. When again pressed by Mary 
Beaton to recall the author, she opines that it might haye 
been David Eizzio : 

Friendship ? I should have died I think long since, 
That many might have died not, and this word 
Had not been written of me nor fulfilled, 
But perished in the saying, a prophecy 
That took the prophet by the throat and slew — 
As sure I think it slew him. Such a song 
Might my poor servant slain before my face 
Have sung before the stroke of violent death 
Had fallen upon him there for my sake. 

Mary Beaton. Ah ! 

You think so ? this remembrance was it not 
That hung and hovered in your mind but now, 
Moved your heart backward all unwittingly 
To some blind memory of the man long dead ? 

Mary Stuart. In sooth, I think my prophet should 
have been 
David. 

Mary Beaton. You thought of him ? 

Mary Stuart. An old sad thought : 

The moan of it was made long since, and he 
Not unremembered. 

Mary Beaton. Nay, of him indeed 

Record was made — a royal record : whence 
No marvel is it that you forgot not him. 

By this Mary Beaton is well nigh resolved to rid the 
world of a woman who, as Chastelard once said, was born 
without a heart. Her mistress asks her to sing, and she 
sings a little French song which Chastelard had made 



Swinburne. 145 

and sung to Mary Stuart in the days when she loyed him 
as well as she could love any one. This tender ditty, 
Mary Beaton thinks, shall furnish the supreme test. If 
Mary Stuart recognizes it, and finds it in her heart to 
say but one gentle word of the unhappy writer, the letter 
shall be destroyed, and the Queen's life will be saved. 

Mary Beaton. Give me leave 

A little to cast up some wandering words 
And gather back such memories as may beat 
About my mind of such a song, and yet 
I think I might renew some notes long dumb 
That once your ear allowed of. [Aside.] I did pray 
Tempt me not, God ; and by her mouth again 
He tempts me — nay, but prompts me, being most just 
To know by trial if ail remembrance be 
Dead as remorse or pity that in birth 
Died and were children in her ; if she quite 
Forget that very swan song of thy love, 
My love that wast, my love that would'st not be, 
Let God forget her now at last as I 
Remember, if she thinks but one soft thought, 
Cast one poor word upon thee, God thereby 
Shall surely bid me let her live ; if none, 
I shoot that letter home and sting her dead. 
God strengthen me to sing but these words through 
Though I fall dumb at end for ever. Now — 

[She sings* 

Apres tant de jours, apres tant de pleurs, 

Soyez secourable & mon ame en peine. 

Voyez comme Avril fait l'amour aux fleurs ; 

Dame d'amour, dame aux belles couleurs, 

Dieu vous a fait belle, Amour vous fait reine. 
7 



146 Chats about Boohs. 

filons, je t'en prie ; aimons, je le veux. 
Le temps fuit et rit et ne revient guere 
Pour baiser le bout de tes blonds cheveux 
Pour baiser tes cils, ta bouche et tes yeux ; 
L'amour n'a qu'un jour aupres de sa mere. 

Mary Stuart. Nay, I should once have known that song, thou 
say'st, 
And him that sang it and should now be dead : 
Was it — but his rang sweeter — was it not 
Kemy Belleau ? 

Mary Beaton. (My letter — here at heart !) [Aside. 
I think it might be — were it better writ 
And courtlier phrased, with Latin spice cast in, 
And a more tunable descant. 

The letter is forwarded to London, and the scene 
shifts to Greenwich Palace, where Walsingham's secre- 
tary, Davison, who has been intrnsted with the deadly 
missive, comes for the last time to ask Elizabeth's signa- 
ture to the warrant. He is reluctant to produce the 
letter, for he is shrewd enough to know that the Queen 
will scarcely forgive either Walsingham or himself for 
having perused its contents. At first, therefore, he 
essays to gain his end by dwelling on the reasons of 
state which make Mary's death essential to the security 
of England, but to these considerations he finds Eliza- 
beth more obdurate than ever. Unable to meet Davison's 
arguments, she pleads finally a sentimental reluctance 
to take life, and produces a petition, lately addressed to 
her by Mary from Eotheringay Castle, which Elizabeth 



Swinburne, 147 

pretends drew tears from her. Then it was that Davi- 
son, appreciating the woman with whom he has to deal, 
has recourse to his last weapon, the letter written years 
before by Mary Stuart, and now transmitted secretly 
by Mary Beaton. 

Davison. Sure it is 

This Queen hath skill of writing : and her hand 
Hath manifold eloquence with various voice 
To express discourse of sirens or of snakes, 
A mermaid's or a monster's uttering best, 
All music or all malice. Here is come 
A letter writ long since of hers to you 
From Sheffield Castle, which for shame or fear 
She durst not or she would not thence despatch. 
Sent secretly to me from Fotheringay, 
Not from her hand, but with her own hand writ, 
So foul of import and malignity 
I durst not for your Majesty's respect 
With its fierce infamies afire from hell 
Offend your gracious eyesight : but because 
Your justice by your mercy's ignorant hand 
Hath her fair eyes put out, and walks now blind 
Even by the pit's edge death ward, pardon me 
If what you never should have seen be shown 
By hands that rather would take fire in hand 
Than lay in yours this writing. [Gives her a letter. 

Elizabeth. By this light, 

Whate'er be here, thou hadst done presumptuously, 
And Walsingham thy principal, to keep 
Aught from mine eyes that being to me designed 
Might even with most offence enlighten them. 
Here is her hand indeed. 



148 Chats about Boohs. 

* ******* 
Davison. Your Grace 

Shall but defile and vex your eyes and heart 
To read these villainies through. 

Elizabeth. God's death, man ! peace : 

Thou wert not best incense me toward thine own, 
Whose eyes have been before me in them. "What ! 
Was she not mad to write this ? * * * 
* * * * # * 

Give me again 
That warrant I put by, being foolish ; yea, 
Thy word spake sooth — my soul's eyes were put out — 
I could not see for pity. Thou didst well — 
I am bounden to thee heartily — to cure 
My sight of this distemper, and my soul. 
Here in God's sight I set my hand, who thought . 
Never to take this thing upon it, nor 
Do God so bitter service. Take this hence : 
And let me see no word nor hear of her 
Till the sun see not such a soul alive. 

The scene of the last act is Fotheringay Castle, where 
Mary Stuart is to die. We scarcely need to say that the 
execution does not take place upon the stage, but it is 
witnessed from a window of the gallery where Mary 
Beaton (who had seen Chastelard go to his death, and 
even then vowed to avenge him), and another of the 
Queen's tirewomen, Barbara Mowbray, have remained. 
There are few things finer in the dramatic poetry of our 
time than the concluding passage, in which Mary Stuart, 
though* she may have lived basely, resumes her queenhood 
and dies like the great ones of the earth, and in which 



Swinburne. 149 

Mary Beaton, like a new Electra, is now racked by the 
agonies of compassion and remorse, and anon seems to 
tower before us with the mien of a retributive angel. In 
this culminating scene, at all events, Mr. Swinburne has 
struck with no feeble or uncertain hand the master 
chords of fear and pity, and speaks to us, as the great 
teachers of tragic truth have spoken. We make a final 
extract from the drama : 

Barbara. Yea, I see 

Stand in the mid-hall the scaffold black as death, 
And black the block upon it all around. 
Against the throng a guard of halberdiers, 
And the axe against the scaffold rail reclined, 
And two men masked on either hand beyond, 
And hard behind the block a cushion set, 
Black, as the chair behind it. 

Mary Beaton. "When I saw 

Fallen on a scaffold once a young man's head, 
Such things as these I saw not. Nay, but on : 
I knew not that I spake : and toward your ears 
Indeed I spake not. 
* * * * * * * * 

Barbara. Not a face there breathes of all the throng 
But is more moved than hers to hear this read, 
"Whose look alone is changed not. 

Mary Beaton. Once I knew 

A face that changed not in as dire an hour 
More than the queen's face changes. Hath he not 
Ended? ******* 

Barbara. And now they lift her veil up from her head. 
Softly and softly draw the black robe off, 



150 Chats about Books. 

And all in red as of a funeral flame 

She stands up statelier yet before them, tall, 

And clothed as if with sunset ; and she takes 

From Elspeth's hands the crimson sleeves, and draws 

Their covering on her arms, and now those twain 

Burst out aloud in weeping ; and she speaks : 

Weep not : I promised for you. Now she kneels ; 

And Jane binds round a kerchief on her eyes : 

And smiling last her heavenliest smile on earth, 

She waves a blind hand toward them, with Farewell, 

Farewell, to meet again : and they come down 

And leave her praying aloud, In thee, Lord, 

I put my trust : and now, that psalm being through, 

She lays between the block and her soft neck 

Her long white peerless hands up tenderly. 

Which now the headsman draws again away, 

But softly too : now stir her lips again — 

Into thine hands, Lord, into thine hands, 

Lord, I commend my spirit : and now — but now, 

Look you, not I, the last upon her. 

Mary Beaton. Ha ! 

He strikes awry ; she stirs not. Nay, but now 
He strikes aright, and ends it. 

Barbara. Hark, a cry. 

Voice below. So perish all found enemies of the Queen! 

Another voice. Amen. 

Mary Beaton. I heard that very cry go up 
Far off long since to God, who answers here. 



ALPHONSE DAUDET. 

Theke is only one French novelist who it seems can 
hope just now to divide with the author of " L'Assom- 
moir " the attention of the Parisian public, and there is 
only one theme left to the political satirist comparable in 
pungent and wide-reaching interest to Zola's caustic pict- 
ure of the imperial regime. Since 1870 the Legitimist 
party have gained not a little in importance and prestige 
at the expense of the partisans of the Bonaparte dynasty, 
and have infected a majority of the reactionary classes with 
Bourbon principles and sentiments. We need not say 
that the abortive coup d'etat projected by the De Broglie 
ministry and countenanced by the Marshal- President 
was organized in the interest of the White Flag and the 
Lilies, and in this quarter, if anywhere, the new repub- 
lic has had cause to recognize a danger. For the pres- 
ent, however, there is no ground to apprehend overt 
hostility, and the moment, therefore, seems propitious 
to frustrate the clandestine efforts of the Legitimist 
propaganda by ridicule, the most deadly weapon known 
to French polemics. This is what Alphonse Daudet has 
undertaken to do in his novel called "Les Eois en Exil." 
What sort of men are these kings, whose foreheads wear 
the aureole of majesty, whose functions are deemed con- 
secrate by the grace of God to a benignant stewardship 

151 



152 Chats about Boohs, 

of the nations, and whose misfortunes have the privilege 
of evoking the blind fervors of an undying loyalty and 
the poignant homage of self-sacrifice ? What are they, 
stripped of the illusions which veil and glorify a throne, 
thrust down from their superb and lofty isolation into 
the crowded walks of common life and left naked in the 
searching and pitiless light of indigence, of impotence, 
and exile ? Can the lingering faith in an unselfish, 
high-aiming, and paternal kingship find no ray of truth 
and fact in the lives of disinherited princes, or must 
the sole gleam of large resolve and aspiration, the one 
flash of dignity and grandeur, be looked for in the gen- 
erous impulse of a woman or the frail promise of a 
child ? Such is the thesis which M. Daudet has de- 
bated in this volume with an acrid and relentless disclos- 
ure of the true characters and veritable careers in exile, 
of these dethroned types of royalty which the events of 
the last twenty years have consigned to private life. 

This novel is dedicated to Edmond de Goncourt, and 
there is no doubt that the influence of the brothers Gon- 
court is traceable in Daudet's style. As regards their 
conception of the novelist's function they were realists, 
but they had mixed, it is said, a good deal with painters, 
and were as fond as that unswerving idealist, Gautier, 
of painting with the pen. It was they, too, who, in a 
feverish recoil from commonplace phraseology, intro- 
duced the use of abstract terms, saying, for instance, 
"a cat's blackness," instead of "a black cat." From 
them Daudet, who in his early stories wrote with sim- 



Alphonse Daudet. 153 

plicity, has caught a good many affectations, among 
others, the whimsical idea, distinctly exhibited in the 
book before us, of representing the whirl and throb of 
Paris existence by a nervous, jolting, breathless diction. 
Moreover, although Zola himself has treated Daudet 
with much respect, it is certain that the latter commits 
one sin against a fundamental canon of realism, that, 
namely, of sympathizing with his characters instead of 
dissecting them with the icy, passionless firmness of the 
surgeon or biologist. Thus he will doubtless be ar- 
raigned by headlong partisans of the new school for the 
species of tenderness with which he depicts the raptures 
and self-abnegations of unreasoning loyalty; and we may 
add that some republicans will scarcely think the author 
has atoned by the unflinching truthfulness of his frame- 
work for the pathetic tincture of his picture, by his 
merciless exposure of royal baseness and futility for the 
unconscious sigh of pity and regret with which he chron- 
icles the wreck of fine enthusiasms and the unfruitful 
outcome of inflexible devotion. IS or is the wavering 
and divided feeling with which the reader lays down 
this book, notwithstanding the dominant tone of irony 
and satire, the sole artistic fault of this remarkable per-' 
formance. Although cast in the form of a novel, and 
compacted with a certain reference to cumulative effect 
and climax, " Les Eois en Exil" has no true plot, but is 
rather a congeries of situations, adjusted with a view of 
evolving the main characters and demonstrating the in- 
trinsic sterility and absurdity of the Legitimist idea, as 

7* 



154 Chats about Boohs. 

well as the deplorable misdirection and waste of energies 
entailed npon its yotaries. In a word, Daudet's new 
performance must be classed, not with such perfected 
and satisfying works of art as " Jack" and "Froment 
Jeune," but rather with the essays of a propagandist 
whose controlling aim is less aesthetic than political. 
Such another book was " Le Nabab," in which the for- 
mer secretary of the Due de Morny held up to scorn the 
garish splendors of the Second Empire, though there, 
too, he was withheld by the delicate and sympathetic 
side of his talent from emulating Zola's sweeping and 
brutal strokes. We may add that both " Lie Nabab " 
and "Les Eois en Exil " seem open to further criticism 
eyen on realistic grounds ; for if we go so far as to con- 
cede that realism means photography, it is at least clear 
that the }:>hotographs must be anonymous, otherwise the 
narrative becomes biography and ceases to be a work of 
art. It is true that this definition might be repudiated 
by Zola, whose " Son Excellence, Eugene Eougon " is 
obviously a portrait of Eugene Eouher, the stalwart 
champion of Napoleon III. 

The number of real personages who figure in the fore- 
ground, or float, like shadows, in the perspective of this 
picture, is indeed very large, and those who care more 
for piquant disclosures of royal delinquencies than for 
artistic merit may find some amusement in tracing Dau- 
det's characters to their originals. There is, however, a 
perfunctory and faint effort at disguise, not merely 
through a transparent change of titles, but by an inten- 



Alphonse Daudet. 155 

fcional entanglement of dates and confusion of dynastic 
relationships, as well as of personal attributes. The ex- 
King and Queen of Illyria and Dalmatia are, of course, 
Francis II. of the two Sicilies and his wife, the high- 
spirited Bavarian Princess who, by her resolute defence 
of Gaeta, sought to save at least the honor of the Nea- 
politan crown. So, too, the ex-Queen of Palermo is 
plainly the Grand Duchess of Parma, who was, however, 
not the cousin, but the sister-in-law of the Queen of 
Naples. It is equally manifest that the Duchess of Ma- 
lines is intended for the Duchesse D'Alencon, though 
here, too, the relationship is purposely misstated, the 
Duchess being, we need not say, a sister of the Empress 
of Austria and Queen of Naples, but in no wise a kins- 
woman of the Grand Duchess of Parma. In the Queen 
of Galicia it is easy to recognize Isabella of Spain, though 
her son is depicted rather with the coarse and tawdry 
lineaments of Don Carlos, than with the mild and com- 
mon-place features of Alphonso II. The blind King of 
Westphalia will at once be identified with the ex-King 
of Hanover, while it is equally palpable that Prince 
d'Axel has been drawn from that brutish stigma upon 
royalty, the late Prince Henry of Orange. But with the 
exception of the ex-King and Queen of Naples, and of 
the Prince of Orange, introduced to mark, as it were, 
the ditch into which the weak and frivolous Francis II. 
was to fall, the regal exiles are mere phantoms without 
the faintest influence on the action of the narrative. 
Scarcely more may be said for the Marquis de Hezeta, in 



156 Ohats about Boohs. 

whom the curious may discover a well-known Carlist 
conspirator ; or for the Due de Rosen, in whom the traits 
of a certain Neapolitan noble are not exaggerated, in- 
cluding his meek willingness to accept the dishonor of a 
daughter-in-law, on the ground that his royal master had 
an indefeasible right to amuse himself with one of his 
servants ; or for the Due de Fitz-Roy, apropos of whom 
the allusion to dull historical compends, whose sole 
readable chapters had been stolen, indicates the author's 
intention to suggest the Due de Broglie. So much for 
such figures in this story as are labelled and ticketed with 
sufficient distinctness to insure their recognition without 
a very profound study of the " Almanach de Gotha." 

So far as this new work of Daudet's has artistic rather 
than political aims, they are concentrated on the diverse 
development of two characters — those, namely, of Francis 
II. and Queen Maria of Naples, under the sinister pressure 
of dethronement and impoverishment, amid a narrow, 
shabby, and degrading environment, in which the single 
bracing, saving, ennobling element is the presence of an 
honest royalist by instinct and conviction, a man of the 
people, who, nevertheless, believes in the divine mission 
of kings, the son of a poor weaver, whose splendid talents 
and- quenchless enthusiasm had procured him the ap- 
pointment of tutor to the heir of the exiled monarch. 
Here we may point out that in the character of this low- 
born, but incomparable exponent of the royalist faith, as 
well as in that of the proud, upright, and resolute nature 
of the Neapolitan Queen, Daudet has evinced the same 



Alphonse Daudet. 157 

willingness to reproduce the outlines sketched by a more 
creative hand, which he betrayed even in his masterpiece 
of "Fromont jeune et Eisler aine." Just as Madame 
Risler in that novel was a refined but weakened copy 
of Flaubert's Madame Bovary, so the ex-Queen of Illyria, 
in the present book, though her physical and some of 
her moral traits are copied from those of the Queen of 
Naples, is in the fundamental conception of her attitude 
between a worthless consort, wasteful of dignity and 
opportunity, and a magnificent embodiment of natural 
kingship in the person of a humble follower, an almost 
perfect analogue to the royal mistress of "Kuy Bias." 
It is worth noting that the heroine of Victor Hugo's play, 
Dona Maria de Neubourg, was, like the Queen of Naples, 
a Bavarian princess. The coincidence is significant, in- 
dicating that artistic instinct compels a resort to Teutonic 
lineage for the fast-fading type of conscientious, benefi- 
cent, and majestic royalty. Certainly it is a fact that 
with one exception the only dynasties which retain a hold 
on the respect and affections of their subjects are of 
German stock, and that the most firmly planted is 
precisely that which, on the whole, has most distinctly 
recognized and faithfully fulfilled its duties : namely, 
the line of Hohenzollern. 

The relation of the tutor Meraut to the ex-Queen of 
lllyria corresponds in all essentials to that occupied by 
Ruy Bias to the Bavarian Queen of Spain, and if the son 
of a French weaver does not become Prime Minister, like 
the Spanish lackey, it is because the exiled Princess has 



158 Chats about Boohs. 

no such post to offer. As it is, lie is the soul of the 
royalist conspiracies organized to bring about the speedy 
reinstatement of the disinherited monarchs; conspiracies, 
by the way, which the reader who remembers the expe- 
rience of Alphonso II. will not by any means regard 
with indifference or derision. Indeed, the state of things 
which existed in Spain after the flight of Isabella, has 
been transferred by the novelist to the southern provinces 
of Italy; while the intrigues of Bourbon partisans in 
the Spanish Cortes during the short reign of Amadeus 
and the succeeding years are but thinly cloaked in the 
imaginary proceedings of the Diet of Leybach. More- 
over, the abdication of Isabella, which was indispensable 
to the success of the Bourbon cause in Spain, is repro- 
duced in the act of renunciation imposed upon the ex- 
King of Illyria by the solemn and unflinching demand 
of Meraut, who, at this crisis, stands forth as the spokes- 
man of the Queen, as the teacher and inspirer of the 
heir apparent, and as the vindicator of outraged royalty 
and a tarnished crown. We may add that these unflag- 
ging and precious services rendered to the monarchical 
cause by a liegeman of humble birth, are by no means 
the only points in the narrative which recall Victor 
Hugo's drama. Like Ruy Bias, Meraut has the gift of a 
flaming, infectious, irresistible eloquence, and it is while 
listening to an outburst of steadfast faith, dauntless 
purpose, and soaring aspiration, from which the shallow 
and conventional spirits of her attendants, turn away in 
perplexity and something like disgust, that the Queen 



Alphonse Daudet. 159 

awakens to the true nature, of the sentiment which this 
base-born sayior of empires has kindled in her breast. 
It is needless to point out how forcibly we are here re- 
minded of that scene in " Ruy Bias " where from an 
alcove of the council chamber Dona Maria overhears the 
scorching rebuke administered by Euy Bias to the knot 
of thievish Ministers, and his superb apostrophe to the 
shade of the Emperor Charles : 

Charles Quint, dans ce temps d'opprobre et de terreur 

Que fais tu dans ta torube, puissant Empereur ! 

leve toi ! viens voir ! Les bons font place aux pires ; 

Ce royaunie effrayant, fait d'un amas d'empires, 

Penche — il nous faut ton bras — au secours, Charles Quint ! 

Car l'Espagne se meurt, car l'Espagne s'eteint. 

TTe are also made to remember how Spain's German 
Queen, mindful with a proud humility of how powerless 
she is, wedded to the semblance of a king, to bestow an 
adequate guerdon on the single-armed upholder of a 
crumbling realm, gives him for recompense only the one 
word "merci," but in that one word she puts her heart. 

Not only has Daudet borrowed something from Victor 
Hugo as regards the humble birth and rearing and the 
self-effacing posture of Meraut, the born apostle and un- 
approached protagonist of the legitimist faith, but in 
the physical aspect and intellectual traits of this great- 
hearted loyalist we cannot but recognize a well-known 
historical personage. In the flaming southern blood and 
vehement gesture of Meraut, in his massive vitality, 
coupled with the swift, acute vibrations of his nervous 



160 Chats about Boohs. 

system, in his leonine head, with its tossing mane and 
flashing eyes, in his visage, seamed with lines, not of 
age, but of emotion, and in the rushing, sweeping flow 
of his spontaneous eloquence, we can see that the author 
means us to recognize Mirabeau, not as he was, but as 
he might have been but for the bruises and storm-stains 
of a tempestuous life, and but for the stubborn, fatal 
reluctance of Marie Antoinette to accept the one de- 
fender who might have saved the monarchy. Those 
who bear in mind how utterly Mirabeau's intellect was 
the slave of his instincts and sentiments, and how far 
he recoiled in the last months of his career under the 
impulse of a dormant loyalty, quickened by the tardy 
appeal of a high-souled queen and woman, will acknowl- 
edge that in Meraut the author has reproduced the 
great orator of the States-General, only diverging so far 
from history as to enlist him on the side to which his 
traditions and inherited proclivities would have inclined 
him. Like Mirabeau, Meraut is a prophet rather than 
a philosopher, an evangelist rather than an expounder ; 
his spacious intellect is the servant, not the master of 
his heart, and responds, like some well-attuned and far- 
resounding instrument, to the touch of deep emotion ; 
he does not scrutinize his axioms, but accepts them 
blindly, and bends his puissant energies to the propaga- 
tion of principles he has never stopped to weigh. Like 
Mirabeau, too, he is mighty rather in the spoken utter- 
ance than with the written word, because his large and 
lusty faculties seem to need the bounding impulse of an 



Alphonse Dauclet. 161 

upright posture, of swelling lungs and brandished arms, 
and, above all, the electric animation shot forth from 
the eyes of a wrapt audience. 

This figure of Meraut is, beyond comparison, the 
most virile and majestic that Daudet has ever aimed to 
draw ; and, although the outlines may be familiar, the 
coloring and movement are so vigorous that there is 
ample room for eulogy of the author's talent. Neither 
is it easy to speak with merely temperate encomium of 
the companion portrait — the wronged, insulted, disap- 
pointed, and disillusionized princess, who sees the vola- 
tile nature of her Neapolitan husband sink lower and 
lower in the depths of Paris debauchery, until the lustre 
of the crown and the honor of the gentleman are alike 
befouled and lost. There is something heroic in the 
constancy with which this high-hearted daughter of 
Suabian dukes, amid the cruel shipwreck of her conjugal 
aspirations and the thousand petty stings of unaccus- 
tomed poverty, clings to her belief in a sublime, irrevo- 
cable mission of kingship, in the fixed sanctity of a 
crown, despite its transient defilement on the brows of 
an unworthy wearer, and to the faith that her son, nour- 
ished with her own pure aims, and uplifted by the 
teachings of Meraut's lofty genius, will yet redeem a 
sullied and seemingly hopeless cause. 

Side by side with these unwavering, austere, majestic 
figures, the heroes and martyrs of a shattered faith, 
Daudet portrays the listless, heedless, unstable comport- 
ment of its titular standard bearer, its official represent- 



162 Ghats about Boohs. 

ative, the despicable ex-King of Illyria. We see him 
accepting, without protest, the spurious prestige won 
through the pious lie by which the wife transferred to 
her worthless husband the credit of her own gallantry 
at the siege of Gaeta ; debauching the daughter of his 
most devoted partisan, and outraging the decencies of life 
by giving the queen a rival in her own household ; steal- 
ing the crown jewels, and pawning them to pay his 
debts at cards ; reeling home drunk and witless at an 
hour when a deputation of his subjects representing a 
majority of the national Parliament were waiting to con- 
cert measures for his restoration ; ready to sell for 
money, in order to appease the importunities of a cour- 
tesan, the dynastic rights transmitted from his ancestors, 
and which he held in trust for his own son ; and only 
hindered, at the last moment, from signing an instru- 
ment to that effect by the threat of suicide on the part 
of the distracted queen, a menace which he could not 
doubt would be straightway executed. So, too, when a 
project of counter-revolution has been matured, and his 
friends, embarked in the expedition which is to kindle 
the uprising, are expecting their prince to lead them, 
he is coaxed aside by the ignoble bait of a new intrigue, 
and leaves them to die alone. And, finally, after run- 
ning through the whole gamut of dissipation, from the 
elegant vices of the self-esteeming sensualist, to the 
crapulence and lewdness of the dance hall and the gut- 
ter, we find him guilty of a baseness to which even the 
comrade of his orgies had been a stranger. It could at 



Alphonse Daudet 163 

least be said of the Prince d'Axel, in whom, as we have 
said, the late Prince of Orange is depicted, that in what- 
ever slough of animalism he might wallow, he had at 
least accepted the stain of his own ignominy. When, 
therefore, the ex-King of Illyria imputes to his friend 
and boon companion a crime of which a court of justice is 
about to take stern cognizance, we cannot but feel that 
the bold cynicism with which Prince d'Axel takes the 
offence on his own shoulders clothes him with a kind of 
respectability compared with the liar and the dastard. 
But although in the end the king's character undergoes 
such complete deterioration, the steps of the descent are 
graduated with much art ; as if the author meant to 
show us that the normal type of royalty differs in no 
wise from an ordinary person, being, so far as inherited 
disposition is concerned, neither much better nor much 
worse than the mass of men about us— than the sons of 
railroad contractors and pork-merchants, who succumb 
by scores every year to the seductions of Paris. Indeed 
the ex-King of Illyria has rather more than the usual 
good humor and attractiveness remarked in shallow nat- 
ures. He likes to see people cheerful about him, and 
is willing enough to spare others suffering or annoy- 
ance, provided he can do so without the sacrifice of 
habit or caprice. He is conscious, too, of his grotesque 
incompetence for the august requirements of his royal 
role. He knows the idol of his loyal Illyrians is a sorry 
piece of brittle clay ; he does not want to be a king ; he 
wants nothing but a bank account and the opportunity 



164 Chats about Boohs. 

of free living without the irksome exactions of official 
duties and the oppressive consciousness of rank. His 
experience has taught him how incongruous and absurd 
is the position of a king in exile, and how futile is the 
effort to uphold his titular dignity by the mockery of 
etiquette and ceremony. 

The contrast between royalty as it is in the person of 
"Christian 11./' and royalty as it seems to be in the 
eyes of fervent zealots ; between the intrinsic worthless- 
ness of the object venerated and the immense devotion 
called forth on its behalf ; is strikingly emphasized by a 
scene in the French Academy, where, among the prizes 
distributed, the highest is awarded to an eloquent mono- 
graph of the siege of Gaeta, published as the composition 
of the Prince de Rosen, though, in fact, the hand of Me- 
raut had penned every line. The monarchical coterie, 
we are told, had profited by the occasion to organize a sort 
of moral demonstration against the republican govern- 
ment, under the pretext of applauding the heroic con- 
duct falsely attributed to the King of Illyria by the 
self-effacement of his wife, and grandly chronicled by 
Meraut in his memorial of the siege. It was understood 
that the Due de Fitz-Roy, who was to read a report on 
the works crowned by the Academy, would turn to par- 
ticular account the ardent passages of the fine pamphlet, 
and thus record one of those sly protests against the 
existing state of things in which the Academy indulged 
itself, even under the Second Empire, and of which it 
has been especially lavish under the republic. This 



Alphonse Daudet. 165 

scene is drawn with so much care, and there is such a 
manifest intent on the part of the satirist to photograph 
in its minutest details the academical ceremony, that we 
may permit ourselves to glance at the interesting pro- 
ceedings. 

Premising that at this species of ovation offered him, 
by reason of the spurious reputation for gallant conduct 
which his queen had managed to create for him, the 
King of Illyria, by way of appreciative recompense, had 
placed his mistress in a box opposite to that occupied by 
his wife and son, we will proceed to note one or two of 
the incidents which followed the opening of the session. 
It was the noble Due de Fitz-Roy, as we have said, who 
read the report on this occasion, and everybody, says the 
novelist, was constrained to admire the way in which he 
rose, moved forward, and set his papers in order on the 
regulation green table. Stooping, spindle-shanked, 
round-shouldered, he looked like a man of seventy, though 
he was in reality a score of years younger. On his ill- 
made shrunken body wagged a puny head with unformed 
features and a complexion suggesting the hue of par- 
boiled flesh, the whole framed in ragged side whiskers 
and a few tufts of hair. To the women, however, he 
seems distinguished-looking, for they cannot forget he 
is a Fitz-Roy ; and it was the same lustre of his long- 
genealogy, in which knaves and blockheads have not 
been wanting, that procured him admission to the 
Academy much more than his historical writings, mea- 
gre, sapless compilations, among which the first volume 



166 Chats about Boohs, 

only had some real value. It is true that this particu- 
lar yolume was written by somebody else ; and could the 
noble Fitz-Roy recognize in the rear of the Illyrian 
Queen's box the broad and luminous forehead which 
gaye birth to his best work, perhaps, says the author, he 
would not gather up the sheets of his discourse with 
that air of supreme and disdainful mastery, or begin his 
lecture with that haughty sweeping glance which sees 
nothing, yet dominates the whole assembly. In a pale, 
labored, flaccid style the Due begins a pompous eulogy 
of the so-called Memorial, written, so he tells his audi- 
ence, by the young Prince Herbert de Eosen, "who 
handles the pen as he does the sword," and then passes 
to a panegyric of the hero who inspired the monograph 
"of that chivalrous Christian II., in whom meet the 
grace, the nobility, the strength, and captivating charm 
invariably encountered on the steps of the throne." 
Now and then, amid these empty, commonplace, bombas- 
tic periods sounds a true, ringing note, some quotation 
from Meraut's text, for which the queen had furnished 
all the documents, everywhere substituting, however, 
the king's name for her own. The crowd applauds 
with an instinctive discernment the citation of strong 
words breathing a proud and careless valor, the story of 
heroic acts performed with a superb simplicity, and told 
by Meraut in a bounding, figurative prose that called to 
mind the epics of old times ; and the result is that, ob- 
serving the rapturous welcome given to such extracts, 
the noble Fitz-Roy, who is no fool, shuts off his own 



Alphonse Daudet. 167 

literary outgivings, and contents himself- with turning 
over the finest pages of the pamphlet. Boused by the 
accents of conviction to a genuine enthusiasm, the whole 
audience springs to its feet, breaks into loud acclaims, 
salutes the incarnation of monarchy, vanquished yet 
glorious, in the wife and child of Christian II., the last 
of knightly sovereigns. The little prince, intoxicated, 
like all children, by the uproar, applauds, too, in his 
naive way, while the queen, drawing a little back, feels 
herself swept away by this explosion of electric sympa- 
thy, and yields her worn heart to the blissful illusion of 
the moment. She has succeeded then, she thinks, in 
clothing with an aureole this spectre of a king behind 
whom she has been masked, in gilding with fresh lustre 
that Illyrian crown her boy shall one day wear, with a 
lustre, too, that no one, not even his father, can be- 
smirch. How trivial now seem all the pangs of exile, 
betrayal, insult, in this dazzling moment which has 
drowned all the surrounding shadow. Suddenly she 
turns, remembering to pay due homage for her joy to 
him, who, standing behind her, obscure, unknown, un- 
thought of, his head pressed against the wall, and his 
eyes fixed upon the sky, has listened to those magic 
phrases unmindful that they are his own, has looked on 
at this brave triumph without a sneer or a sigh, without 
bethinking himself an instant that he has been robbed 
of all this glory. Like those monks of the middle ages 
who grew old in rearing anonymous cathedrals, the 
weaver's son is content to do his work like a workman, 



168 Chats about Boohs. 

to see it rise firm and massive, and towering in the sun- 
light. And for all Meraut's abnegation, for the self- 
immolation of his smile, for the soul which she knows 
vibrates in kinship with her own, the wife of Christian 
II. can only put out a white hand with a soft " merci — 
merci ! " 

Another scene is fraught with illusions no less radiant, 
though fated to be as transient, that, namely, in the 
modest apartments of the queen, where the pledge of 
abdication extorted from the shuffling monarch is form- 
ally carried out. As the crown, dishonored by the 
father, is set upon the innocent brows of a child already 
sensitive to noble admonitions, and destined, it appears, 
to reward with proud fruition the mother's hopes and 
prayers, Meraut's faith in the future of royalty, in the 
mission of kings on earth, which at times had flickered 
and grown faint, blazes up once more with the old fer- 
vor. But how precarious seem the prospects of a cause 
whose triumph hinges on a filament so slender as an in- 
fant's life or health. Is it well to risk the welfare of a 
people on a chance so hazardous, to stake on such a vent- 
ure the anxious lives and willing deaths of men like 
Meraut, to waste the splendid powers of their capacious 
intellects on an anachronism, a mirage, a dream ? Such 
is the lesson which Alphonse Daudet enforces with the 
cogency of veracious portraiture, and the mordant irony 
of example in "Les Eois en Exil." 



LONGFELLOW. 

Whatever shortcomings and limitations may be 
ascribed to Longfellow's genius, it is certain that no 
contemporary poet, not even Tennyson, has been so uni- 
versally and cordially welcomed by the English-speaking 
race. Neither has any Englishman since Byron ap- 
proached so nearly to a world-wide reputation, for there 
is scarcely any country of Europe where some acquaint- 
ance with Longfellow's writings is not accounted an es- 
sential element of culture. If, moreover, he had never 
written a line of original verse, his reproduction of the 
Divine Comedy would have challenged respect for its 
author and his country, since perhaps no man has more 
nearly satisfied Dryden's well-known definition of right 
translation, "true to the sense but truer to the fame." 

It is obvious that the favor of contemporaries consti- 
tutes a letter of credit which posterity may decline to 
accept at its face value. Circumstances, of course, may 
foster, as well as depress, an author ; and it is conceiva- 
ble that the consummate adjustment of his work to the 
taste and s'entiment dominant in his age and country 
might assure to a given poet such ardent sympathy that 
the task of cold and rigorous analysis would be gladly 
remitted to another generation. How inflexibly that 

function is then executed, and how vainly isolated gems 
8 169 



170 Chats about Boohs. 

appeal to the niggard hand which is incessantly weeding 
the roll of honor, is demonstrated by the permanent 
eclipse of Pope's reputation and the precipitate decline 
of Moore's, no less than by the crescent fame of Words- 
worth. 

It is probable that Longfellow received in his lifetime 
as much praise as he may fairly claim, and there seemed 
to be a tacit agreement on the part of reviewers and other 
arbiters of opinion to postpone the estimate of his merits 
to a later day. Even by English critics he was for many 
years treated with peculiar gentleness, while at home, if 
we except the assault by Edgar Poe, which was discred- 
ited by its excessive acerbity, he can hardly be said to 
have been criticised at all. And yet the precise appraise- 
ment of Longfellow's performances, as well as the inquiry 
into the ground and nature of the popularity which he 
unquestionably enjoys, cannot well be neglected by one 
who would comprehend the historical development and 
the actual status of our native literature. 

It would be difficult to guess the characteristic stamp 
and natural scope of Longfellow's genius from a cata- 
logue of his works, for he has tried his wing in many 
directions. Nor is it at all surprising to find the con- 
scious possession of artistic power unaccompanied by any 
clear perception of its specific quality and compass. 
Painters, it is true, seem willing enough to confine their 
labors within a particular province ; but poets are slow 
to recognize limitations, which, nevertheless, are inexor- 
ably demonstrated by the very efforts made to evade 



Longfellow. 171 

them. "What was effected, for instance, by Byron's reit- 
erated essays in dramatic verse, beyond the exposure of 
his curious weakness in characterization ; and how in- 
credibly ponderous and flat is Milton's attempt to por- 
tra} r , with lyrical grace and lightness, the domestic joys 
of Eden. The truth is that the old division of the 
poetic field by the river Loire went deeper than distinc- 
tions of race and language, and the special qualities of 
the story-telling Trouvere, who touched something like 
epic grandeur in the Roland, and half forestalled in the 
Roman de la Rose the social photography of the modern 
novel, were resumed for Englishmen in Chaucer, while 
Burns continued the very different traditions of those 
Provencal Troubadours, whose fitful lays seldom inter- 
preted any broader theme than the raptures and disquie- 
tudes of love. To whichever of these schools a man 
belongs, in whichever province, whether narrative or 
lyric, his poetic talent more willingly exerts itself, it is 
evident that his work lies there, and that he will gain no 
substantial credit by excursive experiments. Thus it 
might not be difficult to show that Longfellow's forte is 
lyric verse ; that whenever he is signally felicitous it is 
in this direction ; that in the ratio of his divergence from 
it his failures are more or less decisive ; and that the 
compulsory employment of his energies in wholly un- 
congenial tasks is chargeable with some productions by 
no means worthy of his reputation. 

The first volumes published by Longfellow were largely 
made up of translations, and his selection of subjects 



172 Chats about Boohs. 

for reproduction revealed the bent and quality of his 
mind. It was plain that he was instinctively attracted 
by the Spanish and German song-writers, and especially 
by utterances of their more serious and pensive moods. 
With Uhland in particular he discovered a sympathy so 
intimate, and assimilated so thoroughly the delicate 
aroma of his model's verse, that poems like "The Be- 
leagured City," " Nuremberg," the " Belfry of Bruges," 
and "Walter von der Vogelweide," can scarcely be dis- 
criminated from the work of the German balladist. In- 
deed, the attitude of Uhland's mind, and the strange, 
haunting charm of his melody, were curiously congenial 
to the temper of cultivated New England people at the 
date of Longfellow's debut. The anti-slavery movement 
had not yet shocked men into earnestness and compelled 
their energies to the business of the hour. While, more- 
over, political questions awakened but a languid interest, 
what scope was there for scholastic or aesthetic* expansion 
within the contracted bounds of a provincial civilization, 
where books were not abundant and travelled men were 
few, where not a single fine picture or statue, nor a ves- 
tige of noble architecture, could be found ? Uhland, 
too, though for somewhat different reasons, was pro- 
foundly dissatisfied with his surroundings. He had a 
keen eye for the shortcomings of the present, and be- 
holding the past through a mist which magnified outlines 
and obscured blemishes, he was half persuaded that Ger- 
many had retrograded since the days of the Minnesingers. 
Of course, an accurate knowledge of mediaeval life would 



Longfellow. 173 

be a positive nuisance to those who love to dwell among 
the legends and romantic lore of chivalry ; and accord- 
ingly ballad makers of "[Inland's school prefer to veracious 
illumination the light that never was on sea or shore, 
and are accustomed to steep their work in sentiment 
which would be pleasing enough, were it not an anach- 
ronism. Eegarded as reflecting in any sort the texture 
and colors of actual life in bygone times, such poetry is 
the mere cloud-work of a dream, the beautiful but pre- 
posterous mirage conjured up by weary and yearning 
eyes. 

Had Longfellow contented himself with mirroring 
the fantastic predilections and tentative dilettanteism of 
a particular class, his audience might have been as eso- 
teric as Matthew Arnold's. But in the collection en- 
titled, " Voices of the Night," were two or three short 
poems; and notably the " Psalm of Life," pitched in a 
key manifestly alien to the writer's prevailing mood, but 
well calculated to win the ear and engage the suffrages 
of plain people. We have heard the above-named little 
lyric gravely cited as a compendium of wholesome ethics, 
when plainly the whole philosophy of the ' ' Psalm" con- 
sists in a vehement begging of the question, in the 
clever marshalling and burnishing of almost Tupperian 
commonplaces. No doubt the author often smiled to 
find his good-natured attempt to emphasize some odds 
and ends of current rhetoric rated by not a few of his 
readers as the captain jewel of his carcanet. 

- It would be absurd to suppose that a reputation like 



174 Chats about Boohs, 

our author's was built upon nothing more enduring 
than the charm of a broad culture, the dexterous repro- 
duction of the pseudo-mediaeval ballad, or those vigor- 
ous exhortations to be "up and doing," which divide 
with " Excelsior" the applause of our common schools. 
His popularity, doubtless, has many elements, but one 
is of a very sterling sort, and to this he may reasonably 
look for durable and fond remembrance. We refer to 
that remarkable series of household lyrics which ap- 
peared during the first ten years of the poet's literary 
life. They are not very numerous, but are to be found 
scattered through the earlier volumes, shrinking bash- 
fully behind some elaborate paraphrase from the Swedish 
or Gascon — a score, perhaps, in all. Their dress is of 
the plainest, and they seem in a measure like waifs or 
changelings, as if the author had forgotten to affix his 
private mark. It was not long, however, before these 
tender and touching outgivings — " The Eainy Day," 
"The Bridge," "Maidenhood," "Daybreak," and kin- 
dred songs — found a home by every fireside in America 
and England, and like the south wind or the carol of 
spring birds, proved as welcome to the palace as to the 
cottage, And very likely had Longfellow been born in 
Scotland, and grown up, like Burns, in obscurity and 
poverty, he might have sung always thus. It is certain 
that in the pathos and simplicity of these modest, naive 
creations we touch the high-water mark of his achieve- 
ment, for they remain to this day more widely known 
and warmly cherished than any of his later, more ambi- 



Longfellow, 175 

tious and sustained performances. Nor can the judg- 
ment well be accounted harsh which, while questioning 
the success of his experiments in some directions, recog- 
nizes Longfellow's claim to a high place in the choir of 
which Burns is a leader and Shelley an ornament. 

While we can give no praise to Longfellow's manage- 
ment of narrative verse, except in the instance of 
" Evangeline," we need not now dwell at any great 
length on his comparative miscarriage in that field. It 
may be said that the stories rehearsed at the " Wayside 
Inn "were for the most part " twice-told tales," and 
could hardly be expected to stimulate the languid appe- 
tites of modern readers, glutted as they are with piquant 
novelties. Under an artist's hand, however, the old, 
faint outlines should have been made to retreat behind 
the finished picture — the limpid current of the narra- 
tive, the crisp, strong characters encountered, and the 
breezy atmosphere inhaled combining to displace the 
earlier versions precisely as the shapes and colors of 
waking life exorcise the shadows of a dream. But the 
fact that Longfellow could see no misnomer in the term 
" romance " as applied to his " Hyperion " was of itself 
a sufficient indication that he would almost always fail 
to apprehend, or to observe, the fundamental laws of 
story-telling. 

When Longfellow directed his attention to the leg- 
endary treasures of America, it is plain that he had the 
great opportunity of his life, and it is almost equally 
clear that, through the inherent weakness of the partic- 



176 Chats abotit Boohs. 

ular theme which he elected to interpret, he substan- 
tially renounced it. But aside from the meagreness of 
its subject matter, " Hiawatha" fails in other ways to 
answer the requirements of a narrative style. No doubt 
the landscape painting is often charming, and the facile 
grace which marks Longfellow's compositions is still 
discernible through the gyves of an awkward and arti- 
ficial metre. But the pictures of Indian manners, al- 
though painstaking, are not vivid, the incidents are few 
and unimpressive, and the threads of connection slight. 
The characterization is particularly faint, Hiawatha and 
Minnehaha being rather phantoms than persons, and 
the general result is a congeries of crude materials in- 
stead of an organic, vital poem. The book was received 
on its first appearance with considerable enthusiasm ; 
but it is now read with the same listless interest as 
South ey's " Thalaba," and seems likely to be consigned 
to the same oblivion. 

Neither can the " Courtship of Miles Standish " be 
considered a felicitous exhibition of the author's powers. 
There is not much briskness in the movement of the 
story, and the characters are scarcely adapted to elicit 
sympathy. There are certain homely themes which can 
be safely treated only with the rugged, honest realism 
of which George Eliot had the secret, and any attempt 
to idealize and exalt them is apt to end in something 
like burlesque. The captain of a corporal's guard, 
whose warlike exploits are limited to brow-beating half 
a dozen timid savages, is not a very heroic figure, except 



Longfellow. 177 

in the sense that a child's terrors in the dark may be ac- 
counted tragical. People forget what the Spaniards had 
been doing throughout the previous century when they 
talk of the Mayflower's voyage as something calling for 
exceptional fortitude, and seek to inyest with epic dig- 
nity the somewhat prosaic privations which her pilgrims 
encountered on a peaceful shore. The services of Miles 
Standish were .doubtless of some value to the Plymouth 
colony ; but. perhaps, the rude sincerity of " Gulliver" 
would have depicted them more faithfully than Long- 
fellow's pensive hyperbole. 

Against these less successful productions it is fair to 
set "Evangeline." There is so much sweetness and 
beauty in this poem, such exquisite tenderness and poig- 
nant pathos that we are well content to overlook the 
looseness of its construction and surrender ourselves 
again and again to its soft spell. The choice of subject 
was most happy, for English colonial annals present few 
incidents fraught with so much sadness and so responsive 
to the gentle melancholy which pervades Longfellow's 
verse as the fate of Acadie. To this day the western 
coast of Kova Scotia, blessed as it is in a mild climate 
and fertile soil, discovers many traces of the patient 
industry which made of this district a Erench Eden. 
Religion has often had her voluntary exiles, but it was 
loyalty which controlled those simple liabitans, who might 
easily have kept their pleasant farms by a formal oath of 
allegiance, but whose integrity rejected even that shadow 
of compromise with principle because, as one of them 
3* 



178 Chats about Boohs. 

put it, "he might swear with an English mind, but his 
heart would still be French." The unswerving constancy 
and meek resignation of this singular people are accented 
in the figure of Evangeline, which, though it may lack 
some human touches and seems hardly a denizen of earth, 
is securely niched in the affections of very many, and 
nobly embodies their purest aspirations. But it must be 
said that Evangeline alone, of all the characters Long- 
fellow has aimed to draw, stands forth in the memory of 
his readers with some distinctness of outline. 

It may be questioned whether a novel and elaborate 
metre was suited to the artless narrative of a village girl's 
misfortunes. Until it has been more completely natu- 
ralized in English, the hexameter line must always in 
some degree divert attention from the thought to the 
mere vehicle of expression. At present it cannot be 
properly pronounced by those who are not classical 
scholars. Moreover, in the conduct of a metrical ex- 
periment it is well to follow closely the fundamental 
scheme of your model, and not perplex the scholar's 
ear by a license of variation scarcely sanctioned by 
authority. Now, the sluggish and ponderous effect 
produced by the use of a spondee in the fifth place, is 
twenty times more frequent in "Evangeline "than in 
Ovid or Virgil. And, again, since nine-tenths of our 
English poetry has preferred the iambic movement, an 
author writing dactylic verse cannot safely make the first 
foot a spondee, for an English ear will instinctively mis- 
take it for the beginning of an iambic line. These slips 



Longfellow. 179 

might be easily avoided, but neither yigilance nor prac- 
tice would enable us to reach the comparative grace and 
airiness of German hexameters, a multitude of monosyl- 
labic words, and that division of compound Verbs by 
which the prefix is thrown to the end of a sentence, 
giving that language a decisive advantage. No English 
adventure in this direction has approached the smooth- 
ness of Voss's Homeric translations. 

One other example of Longfellow's descriptive manner 
deserves brief mention — the "Building of the Ship." 
So far as the poem chronicles, in a vein half lyric half 
pictorial, the varied phenomena of the ship-yard, it is 
nervous and effective, but the attempt to enliven the 
narration with a little character-drawing wholly fails. 
Instead of the short, sharp strokes which might have 
shown us the virile, rough-hewn lineaments of the man, 
we are asked to imagine a Yankee shipwright, while en- 
gaged in fashioning the model of a vessel, running over 
in his mind the absurdities of Tudor naval architecture. 
Presently, too, when he smokes his evening pipe, the 
old man is made to indulge in some curious reminiscences 
worth quoting, because they exemplify the not infrequent 
vagueness of our author's imagery, and his random use 
of geographical names. Thus he portrays the "magic 
charm of foreign lands : " 

Where the tumbling surf 
O'er the coral reef of Madagascar 
Washes the feet of the swarthy Lascar 
As he lies alone and asleep on the turf. 



180 Chats about Boohs. 

The phenomenon of turf growing on a reef below high 
water mark is certainly suggestive of " magic ; " but what 
business has an East Indian Lascar to be asleep on a 
South African Island ? And yet we have heard these 
identical lines adduced in perfect seriousness to illustrate 
the " weird" music of Longfellow's verse. 

It is clear that any deficiency in the power of consecu- 
tive movement and distinct characterization, essential to 
success even in Chaucer's vein, would make itself more 
fatally conspicuous in the field of dramatic poetry. Never- 
theless, Mr. Longfellow has several times adopted a dra- 
matic form, in the " Spanish Student," for instance, and 
the "Golden Legend." Of the former it is enough to 
say that it is a comedy without actors, neither the stu- 
dent nor his G-itana sweetheart being competent to im- 
press us with the reality of their existence. Two or 
three songs, however, intercalated in the piece, have 
been plucked from their cumbrous setting, and placed 
among our household treasures. 

We were informed by the local critics who stood spon- 
sors to the latter poem that it must be esteemed an 
important American contribution to those mystical, 
metaphysical outgivings of which Faust and Manfred 
are types ; and a number of ingenious parallels were in- 
stituted tending to exalt the psychological profoundness 
and ethical worth of the " Golden Legend." Thereupon 
the docile American public straightway ranked it with 
the books which nobody reads, but everybody concedes 
to be worth reading. What a brave, robust, and trust- 



Longfellow. 181 

-worthy thing was our native criticism between the years 
1830 and 1850, and what a ruthless eye it had for shal- 
low sentiment and flimsy thinking ! Is it possible to 
imagine any spectacle more ridiculous than the attitude 
of those provincial wiseacres cocking their ears to catch 
a fancied echo of Goethe's Titan song, and sniffing 
doubtfully at those modest lyrics upon which, in spite of 
the reaction here and there proToked by foolish eulogy, 
Longfellow has built a real and lasting fame. 

If we examine the fundamental texture and essential 
quality of this writer s work, we find nothing in it dis- 
tinctively American. It never occurs to us to say of his 
performances, as we are continually impelled to say of 
Bryant's or TVhittier's, this or that verse could only 
have been penned by one born and bred in the atmos- 
phere of the Xew "World. Xeither have Longfellow's 
productions an English flavor ; indeed, it would be diffi- 
cult to name an English poet the cast and temper of 
whose mind reveal any strong affinities with his. Few 
men have been more catholic in their sympathies, more 
cosmopolitan in their range of study, and we seem to 
trace in him at different epochs a half-conscious surren- 
der to the influence of three distinct foreign schools. 
But while these have tinged and shaped the larger part 
of his creations, his inquisitive and assimilative intellect 
has rambled into more sequestered fields, and delicate 
flowers from Provence and Portugal, as well as hardy 
plants from Sweden and Gascony, have proved obedient 
to his transplanting hand, and learned to thrive and 



182 Chats about Books. 

blossom in his garden. Take for instance the following 
from the Swedish of Bishop Tegner : 

Love among mortals 

Is but an endless sigh ! He longs and endures and stands waiting, 

Suffers, and yet rejoices, and smiles with tears on his eyelids ; 

Hope, so is called upon earth his recompense, Hope, the be- 
friending. 

Does what she can, for she points evermore up to Heaven, and 
faithful — 

Plunges her anchor's peak in the depths of the grave, and be- 
neath it 

Paints a more beautiful world, a dim but a sweet play of shadows. 

Add to this a single familiar stanza, which seems to 
exhibit the perfection of translation, from Malherbe's 
famous consolatory epistle : 

But she was of the world which fairest things exposes 

To fates the most forlorn, 
A rose, she too hath lived as long as live the roses, 

The space of one brief morn. 

To appreciate the finish of work like this we should 
set the original beside it : 

Mais elle etait d'un monde ou les plus belles choses 

Ont le pire destin, 
Et rose, elle a vecu ce que vivent les roses, 

L'espace d'un matin. 

Excursions of this sort, however, were only the epi- 
sodes of a long literary career, and it is chiefly from Gal- 
deron and Lopez de Vega, from Dante, Petrarch, and 
Tasso, but above all from those Germans balladists like 



Longfellow. 183 

Burger, Wieland, and Uhland, who have aimed to re- 
suscitate in a sublime and dainty form the romantic 
rhapsodies of the Minnesingers, that Longfellow has 
drawn his inspiration. It will be noted that all these 
writers, however distinct their rank in the poetic hie- 
rarchy, and however divergent the direction and char- 
acter of their work, have yet one trait in common, a 
certain gravity and solemnity, a pervading sense of the 
seriousness of life, and a profound acquaintance with 
human sorrows. In most of them there is scarcely a 
trace of humor, but their power over the stronger emo- 
tions is extraordinary, and they are the sovereign mas- 
ters of pathos. 

Now it has doubtless been remarked by every reader 
that in the wide range of Longfellow's poetry there is 
absolutely nothing to evoke a smile, much less a laugh, 
while, on the other hand, no English singer has more 
frequently commanded the homage of moistened eyes. 
It is not only that his verse abounds in moving inci- 
dents recommended to sympathy by a delicate and pa- 
tient art, but he has subtle pathetic touches, peculiarly 
his own, which stir the heart we know not why, and 
affect us with a mysterious, inexplicable sadness. As 
illustrations of that vague, tristful manner we might 
cite "My Lost Youth" with its dreamy refrain : 

The voice of that wayward song 
Is singing and saying still : 
A boy's will is the wind's will, 
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts. 



184 > Chats about Books. 

Or again,, in a slightly different key, the two final 
stanzas of "The Open Window." It is, of course, the 
last four lines to which we would direct attention : 

The birds sang in the branches 

With sweet, familiar tone, 
But the voices of the children 

Will be heard in dreams alone. 

And the boy that walked beside me 

He could not understand 
Why closer in mine, ah, closer, 

I pressed his warm, soft hand. 

So, too, in the introduction to "Hiawatha," there are 
a dozen lines steeped in the same mild melancholy. We 
may add that this is one of those instances where the 
porch is finer than the temple. The following is the 
passage : 

Ye who sometimes in your rambles 
Through the green lanes of the country, 
Where the tangled barberry bushes 
Hang their tufts of crimson berries 
Over stone walls gray with mosses, 
Pause by some neglected graveyard 
For a while to muse and ponder 
On a half -effaced inscription, 
Writ with little skill of song- craft ; 
Homely phrases, but each letter 
Full of hope and yet of heart-break, 
Full of all the tender pathos 



Longfellow. . 185 

Of the Here and the Hereafter ; 
Stay and read this rude inscription, 
Read this song of Hiawatha. 

It is impossible to think of Longfellow, and especially 
of his efforts in this direction, without recalling " Evan- 
geline," which may well be ranked among the superla- 
tive exhibitions of pathetic power. The poem, indeed, 
may be said to traverse the whole gamut of tender emo- 
tion, from the deep-drawn sigh of resignation to the 
passionate sob of yearning and hope deferred ; but there 
are certain moments and certain scenes wherein the ex- 
quisite features of the heroine seem transfigured with 
intensity of feeling. Thus in the earlier years of her 
long pilgrimage we find Evangeline's mood shadowed 
in the words which suggested the well-known picture : 

Something there was in her life incomplete, imperfect, unfinished ; 
As if a morning of June, with all its music and sunshine 
Suddenly paused in the sky, and, fading, slowly descended 
Into the east again, from which it late had arisen. 
Sometimes she lingered in towns till urged by the fever within 

her, 
Urged by a restless longing, the hunger and thirst of the spirit, 
She would commence again her endless search and endeavor, 
Sometimes in churchyards strayed, and gazed pn the crosses and 

tombstones, 
Sat by some nameless grave, and thought that perhaps in its 

bosom 
He was already at rest, and she longed to slumber beside him. 

Years glide on, and the wandering maiden is seen in 



186 Chats about Boohs. 

strange and distant places till at length the fruitless 
search is given over. Yet 

Gabriel was not forgotten. Within her heart was his image, 
Clothed in the beauty of love and youth, as last she beheld him, 
Only more beautiful, made by his death-like silence and absence ; 
Over him years had no power, he was not changed but transfigured ; 
Patience, and abnegation of self, and devotion to others, 
This was the lesson a life of trial and sorrow had taught her ; 
So was her love diffused, but like to some odorous spices, 
Suffered no wasten or loss, though filling the air with aroma. 

She finds at last the lover of her youth, in a hospital, 
friendless and dying, and kneels by his bedside : 

Vainly be strove to whisper her name, for the accents unuttered 
Died on his lips, and their motion revealed what his tongue would 

have spoken. 
Vainly he strove to rise ; and Evangeline kneeling beside him 
Kissed his dying lips, and laid his head on her bosom. 
All was ended now, the hope and the fear and the sorrow ; 
All the aching of heart, the restless, unsatisfied longing, 
All the dull, deep pain and constant anguish of patience ; 
And as she pressed once more the lifeless head to her bosom, 
Meekly she bowed her own and murmured, " Father, I thank thee ! " 

And then we listen to the concluding strophes, which, 
like the faltering'strains of some sad symphony, breathe 
the requiem of the faithful lovers : 

Still stands the forest primeval, but far away from its shadow, 
Side by side in their nameless graves, the lovers are sleeping ; 
Under the humble walls of the little Catholic church-yard, 
In the heart of the city they lie, unknown and unnoticed. 



Longfellow. 187 

Daily the tides of life go ebbing and flowing beside them ; 
Thousands of throbbing hearts where theirs are at rest and forever, 
Thousands of aching brains where theirs no longer are busy, 
Thousands of toiling hands where theirs have ceased from their 

labors, 
Thousands of weary feet where theirs have completed their journey. 

And now one word respecting that proneness to imi- 
tation, and to the occasional assimilation of others' 
thoughts and images, which have been ascribed to Long- 
fellow. Doubtless with him, as with all men of ripe 
culture, certain ideas and even forms of expression may 
be traced to this or that extraneous source. But the 
simple test of an author's right to borrow is this : Is 
he able to lend ? There is no question that the stum- 
bling Pegasus of many an ill-provisioned bard has been 
fed at Longfellow's crib. We confess ourselves a little 
tired of this charge of plagiarism preferred so glibly by 
those who, when they try to purloin on their own ac- 
count, behave like the Italian thief, who, as the author 
of " Hudibras " averred, never robs but he murders to 
prevent discovery. No man was ever more open to ac- 
cusations of this sort than Ben Jonson, and it is well 
to bear in mind what Dryden said of that writer : "He 
invades authors like a monarch, and what would be 
piracy in others is only victory in him.". 



ZOLA. 
I. 

There is a writer who at this moment is the most 
striking, positive, and original personage among French 
men of letters, and who yet was long almost wholly un- 
known, except by name, to English readers. Whether 
our tastes or our convictions prompt us to side with 
those who praise, or with those who scout him, the fact 
is beyond dispute that Emile Zola has attained a meas- 
ure of success seldom paralleled in our generation, and 
that his themes and his style, his aims, methods, and 
performances have provoked the widest attention and 
the liveliest discussion throughout Europe. The truth 
is that the author of the series of novels, grouped to- 
gether under the generic title of Les Rougon-Macquart 
is a phenomenon that invites at once the study of the 
artist, the scientist, and the politician. As regards sub- 
ject and treatment, Emile Zola incarnates an aesthetic 
revolution, while in his social and political leanings he 
represents the literary side of the great upheaval which 
followed the collapse of the second empire. Still more 
curious and suggestive is his deliberate application of 
Darwinism to literature, his portrayal of life and char- 
acter under the strict conditions of the evolutionary 

theory, namely, heredity and atavism on the one hand, 

188 



Zola. 189 

with environment and natural or sexual selection on the 
other. These are Zola's credentials, and such a man 
deserves to be scanned, if not with sympathy and ap- 
proval, at all events with respect as the type of an 
epoch. 

M. Zola would probably contend that his distinctive 
attitude as a student of human life is mainly due to 
physical causes, including, of course, hereditary apti- 
tudes. He would not repudiate, however, the influence 
exercised by intellectual ancestors, whose works by vir- 
tue of a subtle affinity, or of long contact at an impres- 
sionable age, may have tinctured, developed, or directed 
his mind. He is not unwilling to be counted the suc- 
cessor of writers who have recognized more or less dis- 
tinctly the same aims — as the latest exponent of a school 
whose origin may be traced back for a century. He 
himself calls Rousseau the founder of realistic narrative 
in France, having in view, of course, the Confessions, 
and not the JSfouvelle Heloise as some of his critics have 
imagined. But Rousseau only suggested the tremen- 
dous force that lies in naked veracity, and it was Bal- 
zac who first carried out the process of ruthless vivisec- 
tion on a great scale. The wonderful minuteness with 
which the individual characters of his persons were pro- 
jected by the author of the Comedie Humaine, and the 
painstaking accuracy of the surroundings in which he 
placed them, sharply distinguished his treatment from 
Victor Hugo's exaggerated coloring on the one hand, 
and from George Sand's pursuit of abstract types upon 



190 Chats about Boohs.. 

the other. But although Balzac diverged at once from 
romantic and from classical models, he did not always 
evince the scrupulous, and, so to speak, mechanical fi- 
delity of the modern naturalists. He was no mere pho- 
tographer, a strangely fecund fancy and an irresistible 
instinct of generalization not seldom forcing him to 
transform individuals into veritable types, as in the case 
of Rastignac, or Lucien de Ruhempre, or La Femme de 
trente Ans. After Balzac's death realism in literature 
lost its hold on the French world for almost a genera- 
tion. Something, it is true, was done by the co-workers 
Erckmann-Chatrian within a restricted provincial hori- 
zon, something by Emile Gaboriau in the almost nil- 
worked field of the judicial and detective novel, and 
something on a wider canvas by the brothers Goncourt. 
But if we except some of Gaboriau's stories, which ran 
through numerous editions, the works of the realists 
failed to please the artificial, jaded society of the sec- 
ond empire, and were eclipsed not only by clever adepts 
in the classic conventions like Octave Feuillet, but even 
by the wretched imitators of the elder Dumas, who spun 
out serial sensations for the daily newspapers. And even 
Zola's veritable master, Gustave Flaubert, whose Mad- 
ame B ovary and IS Education Sentimentale are consum- 
mate examples of novel writing conceived as a form of 
natural history where the methods of scientific scrutiny 
are applied with perfect cynicism, never won anything 
beyond the esteem of a narrow circle. Certainly a man 
of his temper was scarcely fitted to be the pet of the 



Zola. 191 

Tuileries, or to become, like Feuillet, the arbiter of fes- 
tivals and charades at Compiegne, or, like Proper Meri- 
rn.ee, the literary mentor of the frivolous personage whom 
caprice and accident had made Empress of Trance. 

With the empire fell a Yast scaffolding of spurious or 
fragile reputations in art and literature, which had 
helped to prop the political structure. What has be- 
come of Houssaye and Belot, who made a sumptuous 
living by the portrayal of vice and scandal ? What has 
paralyzed the pen of Gustave Droz, whose quaint admix- 
ture of sentiment and sensuality had the piquancy of a 
new sauce ? What has come over the public which used 
to flock by tens of thousands to buy Camors, but which 
now turns with indifference, almost with contempt, 
from the listless elegance and refined vapidity of Feuil- 
let's latest works ? So, too, the cunning affectations 
and pungent epigrams of the accomplished G-enevese, 
Cherbuliez, seem to have lost much of their savor, if we 
may judge from the waning vogue of his performances 
at home. And if Theuriet has so far escaped the gener- 
al submergence of former favorites, it is solely due to 
his descriptions of natural scenery, where, of course, a 
novelist's special qualifications do not come at all in 
question. The real sovereigns of the French reading- 
public at this time, as attested by the conclusive voucher 
of unapproached success, are Zola and Alphonse Dau- 
det. The latter began as an idealist, and his Lettres de 
mon Moulin and Tartarin de Tarascon are charming ex- 
amples of the sentimental school ; but it was only when 



192 Chats about Boohs. 

he joined Zola in accepting Flaubert for a master, and 
under his impulse produced Fromont Jeune, Jaclc, and 
Le Nabob that he attained a great reputation. Yet it-is 
a curious fact that the orthodox realists are not quite 
willing to class Daudet in their ranks. They admit 
that the persons of his recent books are human beings of 
very complex character about which it is not easy to pro- 
nounce an absolute opinion, but in their judgment he 
makes the mistake of sympathizing with his heroes, and 
giving too much scope to poetry and feeling. More- 
over, his style wants, they say, the simplicity and trans- 
lucency with which the more austere realist seeks to 
efface his personality and mirror with crystalline dis- 
tinctness the object of his portraiture. He has borrowed, 
seemingly from the brothers Goncourt, a somewhat 
affected diction, loaded with florid ornament and far- 
fetched metaphor, and at the same time rugged and pre- 
cipitous in movement, as if the novelist meant to sug- 
gest to the ear the headlong current of Paris life. The 
French naturalism of our day finds, as we have seen, its 
perfect model in Flaubert's Madame Bovary, but that 
wonderful anatomist of vicious instincts wanted indus- 
try or fecundity, and only once returned to the task of 
impassive, implacable reproduction. Accordingly his 
mantle has fallen on Zola's shoulders, who not only un- 
dertakes the function of dissection without the faintest 
sign of conventional shudder or rebuke, but avows his 
purpose of disclosing in all his personages the physio- 
logical causes of their actions. 



Zola. 193 

What is the object contemplated by the author of the 
Rougon-Macquart novels ? It is, as we haye said, to 
trace the natural and social history of a family which 
by one or another of its offshoots shall represent every 
class of French society. The better to define his pur- 
pose and enforce the essential unity of his design, the 
author has prefixed to one of his volumes, Un page 
(T Amour, a genealogical tree, which, exhibiting the 
origin of the lineage, marks its early bifurcation into 
two main trunks sharply distinguished in physical 
traits, which, however, are sometimes softened, some- 
times accented in their various ramifications. The 
remarkable virility of a peasant progenitor is trans- 
mitted through two channels, legitimate and illegiti- 
mate, and according to the greater or less influence of 
the female lines, is transformed in his descendants into 
diverse forms of moral and intellectual energy or weak- 
ness. Under felicitous conditions of admixture and 
environment, this ancestral vigor rises to the heights of 
heroism, of creative genius, or of consummate executive 
ability, while in untoward circumstances it engenders 
dexterous knavery or desperate crime. In one of the 
main branches there is an hereditary taint amounting 
to a disease of the nervous system, which in some of 
the offspring is sublimated to the sensitive organization 
of the poet, or the mystical fervor of the priest, while 
in others it breeds a frantic excitation of the appetites, 
conducting in the end, perhaps, to imbecility. In the 
case of every individual whose career is made the object 



194 Chats about Boohs. 

of special study, we are put in possession of all the 
physiological facts which a materialist might deem in- 
dispensable to a just sentence upon his conduct. We 
are told about his parents and his grandparents; we 
know what passions, proclivities, sensibilities he brought 
with him into the world ; how far these congenital ten- 
dencies have been encouraged, lulled, or supplanted by 
his surroundings, until, when he is launched into a 
given medium, we can almost forecast his behavior. 
As with each new volume a new problem in human life 
is laid before us, we approach its solution with a con- 
viction that at least the statement of its terms has been 
exhaustive, that none of the springs of motive, so far as 
these are physical or social, have escaped the author's 
scrutiny. You are impressed also by the glacial impar- 
tiality of the narrative, as if the worst extremes of sin 
and suffering and the divinest soarings of self-sacrifice 
and virtue were alike referred to the inexorable work- 
ings of natural law. In Zola's indifference, however, 
there is nothing galling : there is no trace of malicious 
satisfaction as in Flaubert's cynicism — it recalls rather 
the profound, far-gazing serenity of an Assyrian statue, 
the inflexible, inscrutable tranquillity of a sphinx. 
It is not to be supposed, meanwhile, that because Zola 
never blames or applauds his characters, that the 
reader's sympathies are equally unstirred. Such is often 
the power of his trenchant strokes, such the vitality of 
certain figures, that you quite lose sight of the artist's 
unconcerned, impassive temper, and fix your eyes with 



Zola. 195 

an eager, poignant intentness on the canvas. Curiously, 
too, this man, who handles like a surgeon the most deli- 
cate fibres of the human heart, discovers the effusive 
tenderness of a poet when he turns to outward nature. 
It is as if the materialist were blended with the pan- 
theist in his philosophy; as if the God whom he had 
lost in the labyrinth of physiology, were found again in 
the play of light and motion, the infinite beauty and 
suggestion of the inanimate world. 

It is true that M. Zola eschews psychological analysis, 
that he is satisfied with an outward portrayal of people, 
and that for this reason their soul escapes him. AYe say 
of his creations, Yes, they are most lifelike, we might 
have passed them but now in the street ; on the other 
hand, we know no more of them than if we had passed 
them in the street. "We may con, if we choose, a cata- 
logue of the physiological causes for their feelings and 
actions. But in real life we never use such data ; we 
only see them transformed in sentiment and motive, 
and it is the transformations which kindle interest and 
constitute originality. To which M. Zola might reply 
that if the soul has escaped him, perhaps it was not 
there. That he knows very well what judges, and 
juries, and law-makers, and, for that matter, novelists, 
have been wont to look at ; that it is a question, 
however, not of what we are accustomed to study, 
but of what we ought to study. If we seem to know 
less intimately the men and women to whom Zola 
has introduced us, than we know the impressive or 



196 Chats about Books. 

exquisite types created by other masters of fiction, the 
author of " L'Assommoir," would probably remind us 
that types do not exist in nature, that what we call our 
knowledge of such figments is a delusion, that nothing 
is known but physiology, and that the transmutation of 
food into thought is still a mystery. Moreover, it is not 
quite fair to compare Zola's characters to the stranger 
that brushes us in the street ; we understand them quite 
as thoroughly, after all, as we understand our acquaint- 
ances, or indeed, our personal friends, for we can fore- 
tell their conduct with rather more precision. We shall 
never probably in this world know so much of any 
human being as we know of certain personages in the 
works of Fielding, Thackeray, or George Eliot. Now, 
is it the business of a novelist to draw figures of which 
we shall say, these are men and women, ordinary, every- 
day folk, neither better nor worse ; or figures in which 
you shall recognize winning and noble types sufficiently 
individualized for you to caress the dream of their 
possible incarnation ? That is the question at issue 
between the realist and the idealist, and Zola, for his 
part, does not hesitate to accept the former conception of 
the function undertaken by the writer of prose fiction. 

A word as to the crudities and vulgarities which dis- 
figure many of Zola's pages. Those who have read only 
" L'Assommoir" or "Le Ventre de Paris," and who are 
accustomed to the carefully pruned diction of Octave 
Feuillet are naturally shocked to stumble upon words 
belonging to the unprinted vocabulary which exists in 



Zola. 197 

every language. The truth is that when this thorough- 
going realist essays to' describe a particular stratum of 
society, he does not purpose to put you off with his im- 
pression, but means to paint it precisely as it is, and let 
you form impressions for yourself. He insists that if 
this principle is anything but a pretence, if the truth is 
really to be shown in its native rawness and squalor, then 
the author must reproduce without squeamishness or 
euphuism the idiom of the class and calling he has elected 
to depict ; otherwise we miss the master key to its intel- 
lectual and moral attitude. Of course, those who do 
not care to study at first hand the factory and the grog 
shop need not read " L'Assommoir," but they should not 
go the length of supposing that the same language is em- 
ployed to photograph very different phases of society. 
When, for example, the author sketches the home circle 
of the Tuileries or the Ministerial vicissitudes of the 
second empire, we can assure the reader that M. Zola's 
style is not unequal to the occasion, although his pen is 
not by any means that of a courtier. In a word, Zola's 
novels are like the world. If your ears cannot bear the 
coarse and brutal phrase by which vulgar folk are wont 
to drive an idea home, you must pick your company. 
There will be scope enough for dainty discrimination in 
these twenty volumes. 

There is something almost colossal in the proportions 
of Zola's undertaking, yet it is already well nigh com- 
pleted. He purposes, as we have said, to leave behind 
him a complete panorama of French civilization under 



198 Chats about Boohs. 

the social and political conditions of the second empire. 
In " La Fortune de Eougon " he has unfolded the circum- 
stances of provincial life and the characteristic features 
of the mercantile calling in the petty commerce of a 
rural town. " La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret " is a study of 
the Church, and especially of the privations, compensa- 
tions, experiences, and temptations incident to the cleri- 
cal vocation. In " Le Ventre de Paris " the author studies 
the method of provisioning Paris, while in " L'Assom- 
moir," he depicts the burdens, blunders, vices, and the 
redeeming virtues, the shabby, the revolting, and the 
honorable sides .of a workman's life in the Faubourg St. 
Antoine. In " Son Excellence Eugene Eougon," we 
have a portrait of Eugene Eouher, the famous ex-Minis- 
ter of the empire, so curiously minute in its biographical 
details that almost every incident and personage in its 
pages can be identified. In another number of the 
series, "Tin Page d J Amour" — which by the way is ac- 
cessible in an English version under the name of "A 
Love Episode "—Zola opens to us those minor profes- 
sional circles of the Parisian community which embrace 
the households of notaries, of physicians in moderate 
practice, of Government employees below the grade of 
heads of bureaus, in fact all that stratum of society which 
in England would be ranked just below the top of the 
lower middle class. In succeeding novels the army, jour- 
nalism, the magistracy will by turns occupy the field of 
his camera. Zola contemplates also a volume on the Com- 
mune, that is to say, on the artisan in his political aspect. 



Zola. 199 

Whatever ma)' be thought of the fundamental principles 
of realism in art and literature — a discussion into which 
we will not just now enter — it is manifest that Zola's 
immense accumulations will prove of singular value to 
the future student of France under the social conditions 
of our day. It is probable that hereafter the young 
bachelor of arts, returning from his sojourn in the Quar- 
tier Latin, and pressed to account for his wide knowledge 
of Paris — instead of replying like his fathers, "I have read 
Balzac, and that suffices " — will point to " Les Kougon- 
Macquart " as the exhaustless treasure house of vicarious 
observation. 

ii. 

It may be thought that the theories of realism received 
a sufficiently crude embodiment in "L'Assommoir" and 
" Le Ventre de Paris," but the scope of those works at 
least embraced something besides sheer animalism. They 
purported to be exhaustive transcripts of the life of work- 
shop and market, and, accordingly, types of industry, 
sobriety, and kindliness were interspersed, as we see 
them every day, amid illustrations of sloth, viciousness, 
and shame. They attested, too, such a profound com- 
prehension of the mechanism of society in the particular 
strata portrayed, of the rude necessities and coarse de- 
vices, of the promptings, pressures, contagions amid 
which the tinge and fibre of individual character is ac- 
quired, that our respect for the observer modified our 
judgment of the artist. The student of social science 



200 Chats about Boohs. 

seemed so signally to obscure the novelist that we were 
scarcely more disposed to quarrel with a raw phrase, or 
an offensive fact, than we should be to insist on a sur- 
geon's performing vivisection in immaculate kid gloves. 
Yet, even in those cases, the suspicion must not seldom 
have crossed us that this unshrinking, all-embracing 
scrutiny of human life belonged to the methods of 
science, rather than the processes of art ; that the un- 
compromising purpose of telling the whole truth, in the 
most literal and unvarnished words, would preclude the 
exercise of the artistic faculty in the selection, disposi- 
tion, and accentuation of materials. In proportion as 
the inquirer's purpose should be fully carried out, as his 
eye should be keen, his hand firm, and his tongue fear- 
less, his work, it was suggested, must inevitably pass out 
of the category of artistic composition, and be classified 
with the raw material of history. Unassorted, unwin- 
nowed, and unchastened with any reference to aesthetic 
emphasis and significance, the record of his observations 
would be, at best, a photograph and not a picture, a 
diary and not a novel, a chapter of biography, a cross- 
section of real life. Heretofore, however, none of the 
champions of realism, neither Flaubert, nor the brothers 
Goncourt, nor Zola himself, had been perfectly un- 
swerving and unscrupulous in the application of their 
theory. Zola, for instance, in " La Faute de l'Abbe Mou- 
ret," actually reverted, for a moment, to the idyl and the 
parable. His latest work, " Nana," on the other hand, is 
the most extravagant result of the doctrine that anything 



Zola. 201 

which is true may be printed, and that nothing human, 
though it reek with the foulness of a worse than bestial 
humanity, is foreign to the purpose of the student of 
manners and the painter of society. 

The aim of "Nana" is to depict the sexual vice in 
its most rabid and noisome exhibitions, and the place 
chosen for study is Paris, in the year just preceding the 
collapse of the Second Empire. The principal figure of 
the book is intended to recall, in many phases of her 
career, a person at one time sufficiently notorious under 
the name of Cora Pearl. Like the latter, Nana con- 
trives to ruin three men at once, each of whom may be 
identified with a well-known personage of the Parisian 
world. Like her, too, she has at one epoch of her 
changeful existence a little palace betwixt court and 
garden, from which she, also, one day decamps, leaving 
a million francs' worth of debts behind her ; and again, 
like Cora Pearl, Nana displays her charms to the com- 
munity at large in one of those burlesques constructed 
to permit a close approach to nudity in the feminine 
performer. There are numerous other incidents, which 
are obviously reproduced from the edifying record of 
the English adventuress. Nana, however, is not Eng- 
lish ; she is Erench, as truly and intensely French as 
the mud of Paris from which she sprang. She is the 
daughter of Gervaise, the story of whose pitiful deterio- 
ration is recited in " L'Assommoir." In the last part 
of that narrative we caught a glimpse of Nana which is 

worth recalling, for it discloses the early surroundings 
9« 



202 Chats about Boohs. 

of the woman whose more brilliant years are chronicled 
in the book before us. One night, we are told, just as 
Gervaise and her drunken husband were going to bed, 
they heard a rap on the door. It was their daughter 
Nana, all rags and dirt, who came to ask if she could 
sleep there. She might come in, they said, or stay out, 
just as she pleased, provided she kept the door shut. So 
Nana came in, devoured a crust of dry bread, and fell 
asleep with a part of it in her hand. This sort of thing 
continued for some time ; the girl coming and going 
like a will o' the wisp, sometimes in rags, and sometimes 
well dressed. Only one thing exasperated G-ervaise now, 
and that was when her daughter appeared with a bonnet 
and feathers and a train. This she could not endure ; 
and one night when the dearly-bought finery had created 
a great stir in the house, Gervaise reproached her daugh- 
ter violently for the life she led, and finally, in her rage, 
took her by the shoulder and shook her. " Hands oif," 
cried the girl ; "you are the last person to talk to me in 
that way. You did as you pleased, why can't I do the 
same?" "What do you mean?" stammered the 
mother. "I have never said anything about it," the 
girl continued, "because it was none of my business; 
but do you think I did not know where you were when 
my father lay snoring ? Let me alone. It was you who 
set me the example." Gervaise, the author tells us, 
turned away pale and trembling, while Nana composed 
herself to sleep again. 
After dwelling two or three years in the lowest strata 



Zola. 203 

of Parisian vice, and acquiring in this forcing house a 
certain ripeness of physical comeliness, Nana attracts 
the attention of the manager of the Varietes, and, at 
the time when this story opens, is on the point of 
making her debut at that theatre. The piece is named 
" The Blonde Venus/' and she fills the title role. The 
girl has an air to sing and a few lines to speak, but she 
has not the slightest pretension to be ranked as either 
actress or singer. She is depicted, however, as an ex- 
tremely seducing creature, a Phryne of the stage. One 
effect of her pyramidal triumph, for that is the phrase by 
which a lubricous journalist struggles to indicate her 
success, is the conquest of a certain financier, in whom 
the reader familiar with the second empire will probably 
recognize the quondam head of the Credit Mobilier. 
Approved and supported by this protector of talent, we 
find her presently installed in a handsome apartment, 
and the mistress of a country seat, to which she retires 
in moments of sentimental expansion, when the game 
of cheating an old man for the sake of a dozen young 
men has grown somewhat stale. Here she carries her 
child, a sickly infant of unknown paternity, and it is 
striking to observe how even expressions of maternal 
affection become grotesque and loathsome in the mouth 
of this sorry creature. Equally repulsive is the transient 
semblance of disinterested affection, which, on one of 
these visits, she contracts for an innocent youth, whose 
appetites, prematurely quickened, ultimately drive the 
poor wretch to suicide. By way of ironical comment 



204 Chats about Boolcs. 

on the nature of the sentiment experienced, the intrigue 
with this foolish boy, which is the one pastoral feature 
of the book, and is indeed strongly tinctured with 
the pseudo-idyllic flavor relished by the admirers, of 
"Traviata," is immediately followed in this noyel by 
Sana's headlong flight from her sumptuous surroundings, 
not for the boy's sake but to live with a filthy low come- 
dian, for whose grimaces and antics she had conceived a 
morbid and insatiate admiration. A species of surfeit 
with the relative splendors and decencies of her station 
on the heights of vice is represented as periodic, Nana 
returning at stated intervals to wallow in the mire, as if 
obeying the imperious dictate of congenital instincts. 
After divers self-entailed vicissitudes, she disapjDearsfrom 
Paris altogether, and returns, in the last chapter, to die 
of the small-pox in a chamber of the Grand Hotel. Her 
death takes place on the memorable evening when the 
Corps Legislatif has ratified the declaration of war 
against Germany, and a knot of her wretched comrades, 
collectively representing the virus and spume of Paris, 
are seated about the corpse, recounting their projects 
and abusing Bismarck, while from beneath the window 
surges upward the roar, " To Berlin — to Berlin ! " from 
the throats of an excited and deluded populace. 

In Zola's narrative Nana, and the class of coveted 
hetairae which she typifies, is conceived as some fair ogress, 
into whose yawning and fatal cave multitudes of men in 
hurried and endless procession descend and are engulfed. 
There is room for all grades and ranks of the social 



Zola. 205 

hierarchy, from the Prince of Wales, who figures in the 
tale under the thin disguise of the Prince of Scotland, 
to the rudest athlete or contortionist whose salient 
muscles have provoked a moment's caprice. It is merely 
indispensable that each shall bring an offering of some 
kind in his hand. He that cannot defray the charge 
of the establishment may pay the dress-maker ; another 
shall furnish pin money, another trinkets and bouquets. 
There is a certain breadth and grandeur in her insatiate 
greed and comprehensive harlotry ; her net drags great 
and small ; she seems to have infected a whole city. 
Zola regards her triumph as a kind of hideous retribu- 
tion inflicted by the crushed, mud -stained rabble, from 
which she sprang, on the sumptuous and insolent plu- 
tocracy. She had grown like a rank weed, he says, amid 
the garbage of the Parisian pavement ; she has the 
gorged luxuriance of a plant Whose turgid leaves betray 
the compost bed ; with the superb curves of her soft 
flesh she avenges the beggars and outcasts who gave her 
birth. With her, the cesspool which " L'Assommoir " had 
shown us fermenting among the poor strikes upward 
and permeates the social mass, befouling and canker- 
ing the idle and affluent. She becomes a malignant 
force of nature, a pestiferous yeast, tainting and disin- 
tegrating Paris, turning it sour like curdled milk. In 
one chapter she is compared to a gold-spangled horse-fly, 
spawned from ordure, hovering above the carrion that 
lies rotting by the way-side, sucking venom from its 
putrescence, and poisoning the wayfarer, whose cheek 



206 Chats about Books. 

it brushes with its fetid wing. Elsewhere in the volume 
she is pictured in her gorgeous dwelling, heaped with 
aimless, tasteless riches, as standing erect, arrogant, 
sphinx-like, with a drove of worshippers rooting, swine- 
like, at her feet. Like those antique monsters, says 
the author, whose redoubtable domain was strewn 
with bones, her heel rested upon skulls, and catastro- 
phes environed her. At length the task of ruin and 
death is completed ; wretchedness has spent its store of 
venom ; Nana has exacted blood money for her bruised 
and smarting kindred ; the beggar and the outcast are 
avenged. She has made her house like the place of which 
Kuskin has written, " A loathsome centre, the smoke of 
its sin going up into the face of Heaven, like the furnace 
of Sodom, and the pollution of it rotting and raging 
through the bones and the souls of its frequenters as if 
it were a volcano whose ashes break out in blains upon 
man and beast." 

It should be manifest to the reader that this latest 
book of Zola's cannot be literally translated' into English. 
In this country we are not in the habit of locking up our 
bookcases, or of prohibiting our daughters from turning 
over volumes on the counters of reputable booksellers. 
It is true that the narratives of Defoe may be found in 
most gentlemen's libraries, and that the great English 
realist has treated a theme analogous to that dealt with 
in this volume. But " Koxana " is relatively cleanly 
and austere, because while the incidents of a vicious 
woman's life are therein reported faithfully and crudely 



Zola. 207 

enough, the novelist has not thought it needful to 
transcribe the shocking impurities of her language. In 
this respect Defoe is far less brazen and unflinching than 
is Zola, who lets us hear the kind of speech uttered amid 
the garish splendors and spurious refinement of opulent 
Parisian lewdness. There is a vein, too, of enigmatical 
and anomalous depravity for which the English language 
has no name, and which cannot be excised, because it 
winds through the whole action, and curls about the 
pivots of the story. 

There is another reason why Nana is not presentable 
in an English version. To expurgate the foul language 
put in the mouths of certain characters, to soften and 
disguise the crapulence of certain incidents — in a word, 
to emasculate the work — would infuse a taint into the 
performance. It would give us a lascivious semi-dis- 
closure for Zola's relentless and freezing nudity ; it 
would transform a repulsive into a libidinous picture. 
Zola's ethics are different from Burke's : he believes that 
vice becomes tenfold more hurtful and contagious when 
it is shown divested of its essential grossness. He does 
not expect young women to read his books, and he would 
be the first to concede that even the most severe and icy 
survey of certain themes is incompatible with innocence. 
He writes for men, but not after the manner of too 
many of his fellow authors, with the aim of tickling 
and exciting them. He holds, with Flaubert, that an 
absolutely veracious exhibition of vice in its nakedness 
is rather repellant than attractive. No man has read 



208 Chats about Boohs, 

"Madame Bovary " without carrying away a profound 
impression of loathing and abhorrence for the sins against 
continence which so many novelists have essayed to dig- 
nify. And just as Flaubert, in his master- work, has 
pilloried the adulteress, so Zola has foreseen, in the book 
before us, that he should make the modern Lais offensive 
and sickening by painting her exactly as she is. 
Through all the smudge and obscenity heaped upon his 
truthful canvas, the essential cleanliness of his purpose 
never wavers and is never frustrated. We rise from the 
perusal of his narrative without one sting of appetite, 
one twinge of sympathy, but sick and faint as from the 
retchings of some violent emetic. 

The appearance of this novel, in which Zola's point 
of view and characteristic method are projected with 
peculiar emphasis, naturally suggests comparison with 
that work of Balzac's in which a like subject has been 
handled upon distinct principles, and with a widely 
different result. Balzac, it will be remembered, de- 
signed to offer to posterity in his " Comedie Humaine," 
just such a conspectus of French society in the third 
decade as Zola means to furnish for the seventh decade 
of our century. In the former's comprehensive survey, 
the kaleidoscopic phases of Parisian vice and crime were 
by no means overlooked ; indeed, they have been thought 
to occupy more than their due proportion of his teeming 
canvas. In " Les Splendeurs et Miseres des Oourti- 
sanes," Balzac attempted a broad and faithful portrayal 
of their lives, a review of their abrupt and inexorable 



Zola. 209 

vicissitudes from affluence to indigence. So far as the 
mere framework, accessories, and stage properties, the sit- 
uations, incidents, and motives of his narrative were con- 
cerned, Balzac's genius for observation has seldom been 
more potently exerted. The nurture and surroundings 
of Esther Gobseck, her congenital instincts and habitual 
practices, her degraded past and remediless future, are 
etched with a mordant veracity that bites into the bone. 
But when the scene is ready and the girl herself is 
brought upon the stage, an extraordinary metamorphosis 
comes over the spirit of the tale. Instead of a frigid 
study in morbid anatomy, we have a flight of rhapsody ; 
the surgeon gives place to the poet. What began like 
an autopsis of bestiality, ends in the apotheosis of a 
pure and selfless love. In his portrait of the typical 
courtesan, as in so many of his works, Balzac the 
dreamer and creator effaces Balzac the observer. He 
has put himself into the picture, discarding realities, 
pursuing an ideal. He starts with the monstrous incon- 
gruity of giving Esther, the courtesan par excellence, a 
poet for a lover, and thenceforth bends the energies of 
his incomparable talent to proving her worthy of a poet's 
devotion. He invests this offspring of the gutter and 
tenant of the slums (whom her eld associates had 
given the suggestive sobriquet of La Torpille — the 
cramp-fish), with Miranda's candor and Imogen's sweet- 
ness, with Helen's docility, Cordelia's spirit of self-sacri- 
fice, and Isabel's horror of impurity. Of course such a 
being commands sympathy, and not detestation; her 



210 Chats about Boohs. 

life appears a tragedy, and not a shabby farce. In a 
word, her story has become, in Balzac's hands, a master- 
piece of idealization ; a work of art, and not at all a 
work of nature. A being who is drawn thus lovable, 
admirable, almost celestial in the height of her self- 
abnegation, has obviously ceased to have anything in 
common with the class which Balzac assumes to study. 
Far from being a type, she is not even a possible anomaly, 
for it may safely be affirmed that no such creature could 
exist in the given environment. The glorification of 
the courtesan thus begun by Balzac has, we need not 
say, been pushed ad nauseam by later novelists. It 
reached the acme of absurdity in Dumas' "Dame aux 
Camellias/' from which, happily for the morals of the 
youthful reader, the reaction has been sudden and pro- 
found. At last a harlot has been stripped of her coun- 
terfeit idealism, and exposed in her genuine foulness by 
Emile Zola, the moral influence of whose books can no 
more be likened to that exercised by Balzac and the 
younger Dumas than the function of a chemist can be 
compared with a procurer's. 

To purge the passions, we are told on high authority, 
is the aim of tragedy ; but Aristotle is far from affirming 
that the methods of the dramatist and those of the phy- 
sician should be identical. It is one thing to watch, 
rapt and awestruck, on the stage of an Athenian theatre 
those who have sinned in the high places, a Thyestes, a 
Clytemnestra, caught in the meshes of an irrevocable 
doom. It is another thing to track the fetid course of a 



Zola. 211 

lewd woman from pinchbeck magnificence to hopeless 
squalor, from the lazaretto to the morgue. For his part, 
however, Zola cares but little about the abstract concep- 
tions of beauty and sublimity, and he snaps his lingers 
at assthetic canons, no matter how potent the names 
which may have sanctioned them. He is a Jacobin in 
politics, an iconoclast in literature ; he prefers the dis- 
secting room to the studio, and is perfectly willing to be 
refused the title of artist, provided you will concede to 
him the useful name of physiologist. Certainly the 
works of Zola will be accounted valuable material by the 
future student of nineteenth century society. What the 
writings of Apuleius and Petronius Arbiter are for the 
resolute inquirer into Roman civilization that Zola's 
" Nana " may be found when another generation shall 
seek to comprehend the social decomposition and polit- 
ical catastrophe of France under the second empire. 



WHITTIER 

We are favored from time to time with ingenious 
theories to account for the non-appearance of the Ameri- 
can drama or novel. For the composition of those 
desiderated works, the one thing lacking, probably, is 
brains. We can hardly escape this conclusion, since the 
social asperities and crudities supposed to cramp the 
play of fancy in general should be specially discouraging 
to poetry ; yet it so happens that we possess a poet 
who is distinctively, even curiously, American. We 
refer, of course, to John G. Whittier. This earnest 
and useful man, who is likewise a punctilious and 
painstaking artist, owes nothing to class or coterie, to 
the atmosphere of .partial praise and mutual admiration. 
His reputation has grown like a forest tree, and may 
reasonably expect the life of one. In the. evening of 
his days, a modest singer, who seems never to have 
sought prestige by cunning ways, and whose merits were 
long eclipsed at home by the transient glitter of other 
names, finds himself grown dear to a whole country and 
very generally accepted as one of its truest lyric repre- 
sentatives. 

Mr. Whittier is a very voluminous, and therefore inevit- 
ably an unequal, writer. In the attempt to form an esti- 
mate of a given poet in our day, when the trick of correct 

212 



Whittier. 213 

metrical expression seems to be easily learned, we are 
confronted on the threshold by the question, what precise 
distinction have we in mind when we talk of vers de 
societe, " occasional verses," and the like, as something 
discriminated from genuine poetry, and hesitate to 
accord the name of poet to such masters of charming 
rhyme as Praed, Thackeray, and Wendell Holmes ? 
Some clear notion of this difference is indispensable for 
grading and classifying the work even of the greatest 
artists, since the field of their achievements is commonly 
too broad to admit everywhere the theory of irresistible 
vocation, much less of impulsive utterance. Not even 
these men sang as the birds sing, of if they sometimes 
did, not always or often. Obviously where the range of 
theme is wide, and the treatment exacted various, the 
chemic heat of strong emotion must many times be 
wanting, and the cold chisel of the mechanical crafts- 
man, toiling to keep body or reputation alive, will not 
seldom leave its marks. 

The truth is, apparently, that all canons of intelligent 
criticism may be deduced from the ancient difinition 
(which shuts out, by the way, didactic verse), that a 
poet's single aim is to rouse the emotions, and his 
instrument the pictorial power of the quickened imagi- 
nation, coupled with the musical effects of song. But 
since the wells of profound feeling must be sought about 
the roots of humanity, in the fundamental relations of 
men to one another and to their surroundings, rather 
than in the surface contrasts of artificial life, it may 



214 Chats about Books. 

happen that one writer mistakes the proper field of 
poetry, and so produces something trivial or occasional 
— vers de societe, in a word — while another, aiming 
shrewdly enough, may yet through native frigidity or 
temporary miscarriage fail to fire the reader's fancy, 
and the result is merely rhythmic, lacquered prose. 

Inherent inertness and clumsy workmanship are sel- 
dom overlooked, and each generation may be trusted to 
deal with the latter class of poetasters. Kirke White, 
Montgomery, Alexander Smith, and our American Per- 
cival were brought to judgment by their contemporaries. 
But those accomplished gentlemen who masquerade in 
verse, and use the sonnet as Congreve did the drama, 
to embalm the sentiment of high society, whose short- 
comings are principally due to a narrow and superficial 
theme, and whose genre pictures often evince consider- 
able imagination and a remarkable command of rhyth- 
mic mechanism, carry it bravely enough for a season, and 
sometimes in England have been thought worthy of the 
laurel. Moreover, as these pleasant, tempered voices 
have their moments of genuine fervor, and strike now 
and then some chord of universal sympathy, while on 
the other hand the strongest works of the great singers 
are marred by intervals of languor and remissness, dis- 
crimination in certain cases becomes a question of aver- 
ages which is willingly left to later times. 

Mr. Whittier can afford to own that he has sometimes 
failed to rise above the level of the verse-maker, and 
perhaps only those who, like Gray, lead a semi-claustral 



Whittier. 215 

life, are able to practise that wise reticence which as- 
sures unqualified approval. A writer who celebrates the 
events of the passing hour must expect the lustre of 
some performances to fade with the interests which 
called them forth, and in the mass of Mr. Whittier's 
productions, representing as it does the fruitage of a 
long and busy life, there is much, undoubtedly, of an 
ephemeral character. But there is an abundance of 
durable work of a 2^>eculiar and rare quality, and there 
are certain themes which, by right of discovery, this 
writer has made his own. On the whole, his distinctive 
merit is to have detected beneath the rugged surface of 
New "England life a romance and beauty of whose exist- 
ence many of us were sceptical ; and with respect to his 
achievements in this direction we are naturally led to 
contrast him with Longfellow. 

The first metrical essays of Longfellow and of "Whit- 
tier were published about the same time, but the for- 
mer's success was far more prompt and signal. His 
" Voices of the Night," and those still earlier poems 
now forgotten, were written in the same tristful minor 
key to which his most characteristic later utterances 
instinctively adjust themselves. It is the voice of an 
elegant Jeremiah bewailing the rudeness of his en- 
vironment, gazing hungrily outward and backward to 
lose in other lands and times the homely spectacle 
of hard-working, hard-featured New England, and 
turning to the face of nature, not with cheery, spon- 
taneous homage, as to the goodly frame of a blithe 



216 Chats about Books. 

world, but with a sigh of sentimental satisfaction, 

because 

No tears 

Dim the sweet look that nature wears. 

Hawthorne's attitude toward his own country was 
much the same, and the limited sale of his novels meas- 
ured the numerical strength of the cultivated class which 
shrank from the rawness and austerity of a provincial 
civilization, and sympathized with that spirit of plain- 
tive isolation and dainty estrangement from the actual 
world which imparts to Longfellow's verse its individual 
flavor. If any one desires to gauge, the mediocrity of 
New England culture just before the period when a knot 
of young people made the "Dial" their voice and began 
to found a sterling native literature, let him examine 
the curriculum of Harvard College at that date, and note 
what a slender outfit was suffered to pass muster for a 
liberal education. The fact that Mr. Longfellow was 
master of a correct and graceful English style was of it- 
self extraordinary distinction, and some metrical trans- 
lations from the Spanish and German were accepted in 
perfect good faith us the credentials of exceptional 
scholarship. There is no pride like the pride of poverty, 
and the spirit which prompts the Highlander to exagger- 
ate the prowess of clansmen, was at once enlisted in be- 
half of an author who had some tincture of cosmopolitan 
thought and could write fluently without lapsing into 
dialect. 

Whittier's initial performances were of a different kind. 



Whittier. 217 

The aroma of scholarship was not conspicuous in them, 
although the writer was a scholar, and has since evinced 
a range of culture by no means inconsiderable. But his 
first productions were racy of the soil, and their savor 
was pungently American. For this reason they were 
dealt with somewhat cavalierly by the censors of our 
nascent literature, and were substantially left to find 
an audience for ' themselves. We need not say that 
readers were nevertheless forthcoming, and it was not 
long before his household lyrics gave Whittier such a 
hold on the popular heart as made him later, in the 
anti-slavery agitation, a veritable power in the land. 
The songs and ballads which formed the bulk of his 
earlier volumes were pitched in a key wholly distinct 
from that of Longfellow's verse, being adjusted with in- 
tuitive precision to the average sentiment and intelli- 
gence of that great body of readers to whom recondite 
learning is a stumbling block and hyper-refinement fool- 
ishness. Naturally, an author who contrived to dignify 
the inexorable bleakness of existence under the condi- 
tions of New England climate and soil, and to cast a 
halo of high purpose about that scramble for warmth 
and food which summed the life of the majority, was, in 
the end, hailed with delight by thousands to whom the 
suave music of Longfellow's ' ' Prelude " and the pensive 
charm of the " Coplas de Manrique " were wasted breath. 
Far from aiming to bestow felicitous embodiment on an 
evanescent mood of our higher society, the naive, imper- 
sonal creations of the Quaker poet were conspicuously 
10 



218 Chats about Boohs. 

wanting in that adroit reminiscence and dainty allusion 
which infuse an exotic sweetness and evolve a classic 
atmosphere. In them we catch for the first time the 
voice of a genuine New England bard, the accents native 
to a homely yet tender spirit, not cramped by any half- 
conscious imitation of foreign styles and methods, or 
strained by the deliberate effort to sustain ambitious 
song. We need not quote from works which are fa- 
miliar to almost every reader, and we will merely name 
such legends of New England history as " Cassandra 
Southwick," "Mary Garvin," "The Witch's Daugh- 
ter," " Skipper Ireson's Kide " — those " Songs of Labor," 
which found means to ennoble the most commonplace 
vocations — and, in another vein, "Maud Muller," "The 
Playmate," "Memories," and "The Old Burying 
Ground." 

How tawdry beside some of these artless lyrics appear 
the finesse and glitter, for example, of Moore's Melodies, 
admirably attuned, no doubt, to the drawing-room or 
to the simulated simplicity of fetes champetres, but 
which do not rise to the lips unbidden beside a cradle or 
a grave. There would seem to be two roads to Parnas- 
sus, and probably the slow-growing affection of plain 
folk bestows a more enduring guerdon than the prompt 
applause of the cultivated few. Who, in our day, reads 
the "Fairy Queen" because he loves it ? and yet how 
many simple ballads, penned by nameless contemporaries 
of Spenser, are counted among our household treasures. 
We do not forget that our other poet, Longfellow, has 



WMttier. 219 

written not a few sweet songs, but they seem to want in 
some degree the directness and spontaneity of Whittier's 
best work, and sometimes betray a kind of labored 
homeliness which jars on a sensitive ear. 

While Mr. Whittier's lyrical reputation was slowly 
but solidly taking root, he made more than one venture 
in the field of narrative poetry. There was plainly a 
presumption against his success in that direction. There 
are singers and makers in the guild of poets, and not 
often are the diverse talents which speak in narrative 
and song united in the same mind. The capacity, in fact, 
of strong lyrical utterance seems to imply a temporary 
fusion of the whole emotional nature in a univocal mood, 
coupled with a partial suspension of the critical faculty. 
Now, is it probable that where a habit of facile self -sur- 
render to transitory moods has been contracted, the 
fancy can safely be intrusted with the evolution of a co- 
herent symmetrical work of considerable length ? Under 
such circumstances, should we not expect the essential 
conditions of narrative to be misconceived or impulsively 
ignored ? 

Certain shortcomings of WMttier — and we may add, 
of Longfellow — in this direction are rendered salient by 
comparison with the master raconteurs. Doubtless the 
Canterbury Tales, the lays of Scott, and that cycle of 
legends set forth in the "Earthly Paradise " will be ac- 
cepted as models. From Chaucer's " Knight's Tale," 
for instance, we learn the scope and processes of narra- 
tive verse. The poet means to tell us a story in the most 



220 Chats about Boohs. 

straightforward and effective way, and, therefore, while 
glimpses of fair landscapes, fitful bursts of melody, and 
even pious homilies are not wanting, these are merely 
accessories everywhere subordinate to crisp characteriza- 
tion and the swift development of plot. Accordingly, 
it is not the rhythm or the diction, but just the story 
which holds the ear. A like directness of aim lends 
vigor to Scott's verse ; and for this reason, even chil- 
dren, who are impatient of digressions, and only per- 
plexed by the more subtle graces of a poetic style, love 
Marmion and Eokeby. It is true that we are also in- 
debted to Scott for some of the finest minor lyrics in 
our language, and so far he may seem to have furnished 
a precedent to Longfellow and Whittier ; but Sir Walter 
did not postpone until after years of song writing his 
essays in a form of poetry which demands protracted, 
deliberate evolution. On the contrary, his first serious 
performance was a sustained, resolute flight, and his 
abandonment to the lyric mood seems to have been 
merely episodical, and perhaps wore to him the aspect 
of relaxation from more circumspect and continuous 
labor. 

There is no doubt that the latest successful weaver of 
tales in rhyme is a zealous student of Chaucer's man- 
ner. Indeed, Morris has somewhat estranged the sym- 
pathies of a modern reader by the curious felicity with 
which he has caught the mediaeval tone and attitude 
of his master. He has even carried a fondness for 
Chaucer's diction to unreasonable length, reproducing 



Whittier. 221 

words and turns of phrase long obsolete, and laying 
violent hands on our present pronunciation, notably by 
accenting the present participle of many verbs on the 
last syllable instead of the penult. But we could cheer- 
fully forgive any man such aberrations who would ap- 
proach, as Morris does, the symmetry, briskness, and 
energy of the Canterbury Tales. His descriptions of 
outward nature," though vivid, are effected by short, 
random strokes, and his melody, like Chaucer's, is not 
suffered to drown the narrative in long strophes of lyri- 
cal expression, but modestly blends with it like the ac- 
companiment of a lute. In short, he addresses himself 
to the business of a story teller with simplicity and self- 
repression. 

In Whittier's " Tent on the Beach " and Longfellow's 
" Tales of a Wayside Inn " our American poets have 
tacitly invited a comparison with Chaucer. In the lat- 
ter experiment a party of travellers weather-bound in a 
country tavern, and in the former a knot of friends en- 
camped on the seashore in the heats of midsummer, 
agree, like the Canterbury pilgrims, to beguile the time 
with tales, and an attempt is made to preface their nar- 
ratives with sketches of their several characters. But 
the etching is pale and irresolute and we miss the cun- 
ning touches, the nervous drawing, and bright tints 
which make the parson, the prioress, the clerk of Oxen- 
ford, and other guests of the " Tabard " as lifelike as 
the portraits of near friends. Moreover, in the tales 
themselves there is a deficiency of point, of progressive 



222 Chats about Boohs. 

movement to a culmination, and they do not easily fix 
themselves in the memory. 

Again, when Whittier and Longfellow in other narra- 
tives directed attention to the legendary treasures of 
America, their choice of theme was not specially felici- 
tous. How could they overlook, for instance, and 
abandon to alien hands that portion of the scheme of 
the "Earthly Paradise," which involved the portrayal 
of the Inca and Aztec civilizations, a subject steeped in 
that romance and mystery which poets go so far to seek ? 
What possible scope or stimulus could be afforded by 
the meagre annals of those savage red men, whose vir- 
tues are mainly mythical and whose simplicity is a 
snare, contrasted with the massive outlines of Monte- 
zuma's empire, or with the blended mildness and sagac- 
ity of that Peruvian State whose penal code recognized 
few offences, but chief among them ranked the lie. To 
an American artist, apparently, it should have been a 
labor of love to illumine the fading record of those 
moribund races and to fuse the scattered data which lie 
sterile in the chronicler's page into shapes of life and 
beauty. It scarcely seems a loftier or worthier, task to 
dignify the crooked ways of lazy, treacherous nomads, 
and emphasize the mendacious features of Cooper's im- 
possible Indian. 

We should have liked to glance at the "Voices of 
Freedom " and other contributions to the anti-slavery 
cause, of which Whittier was as truly the laureate as 
Lloyd Garrison was the protagonist ; but we must pass 



Wliittier. 223 

these for the present, as well as those national lyrics or 
" Songs in War Times/' which are perhaps the best 
known of the poet's works. There is one aspect, how- 
ever, of Whittier's verse which we would not overlook, 
and that is the singular purity of his moral influence. 

There is no room in this case for the too frequent con- 
flict between the feeling of grateful admiration which 
prompts us to exempt an accomplished artist from 
moral accountability, and the instinctive demand of the 
public conscience that the verse whose sweetness wins 
the ear shall likewise be clean and wholesome. "Will- 
ingly would Chaucer in his last days, if the final para- 
graph of the so-called "Parson's Tale" is authentic, 
have stricken from the " Canterbury Tales " the lewdness 
and ribaldry which disfigure them ; but there is not a 
line or a word in the wide range of Whittier's work 
whose suggestion of impurity the writer need wish to blot. 
Here, at all events, is a poet who can read Sidney's 
Defence of Poesy without a twinge or a sneer, who may 
affirm that kindly and upright living has been the con- 
stant burden of his song, and that he has faithfully, 
within the compass of his talent, fulfilled the genial 
function which, in Sidney's words, " not only shows the 
way but giveth so fair a prospect into the way as will 
entice any man to enter into it." 

In that philosophy which refers all that is generous 
and lofty in the human heart to the operation of sym- 
pathy, we may doubtless find the key of Whi trier's 
ethics. So far as his unobtrusive voice may be said to 



224 Chats about Boohs. 

preach, anything, it preaches the gospel of altruism, and 
we can only gauge aright the merit of such teaching by 
recalling what different lessons were put forth by a 
school of poetry which dominated at the outset of his 
career, as well as by another whose vigorous develop- 
ment has partially overshadowed its close. The philoso- 
phy of Byron, of Heine and De Musset exhibited that 
less repulsive form of egotism, the offspring of a half -re- 
luctant atheism, which surveys its own isolation with a 
kind of horror, and whose defiance not seldom borrows 
the accents of despair. On the other hand, Morris and 
Swinburne appear to acquiesce with entire satisfaction 
in the dreariest corollaries of materialism, and the one 
with euphuistic refinement, the other with cynical sin- 
cerity set forth the rapture and the wisdom of selfish, sen- 
suous existence. Perhaps in no way can the benignant 
spirit which makes Whittier's poetry a potent instru- 
ment of healthful education be more nicely discrimi- 
nated than by contrast with the atmosphere which en- 
folds the " Earthly Paradise." 

We need not stigmatize Morris's poetry as heathen, 
for that would raise an unnecessary question. We may 
even allow his premises, and still except to the bleak 
philosophy he rears on them ; and while we yield to the 
charm of his melody, repudiate his scheme of happiness. 
For admitting that life is bounded by the grave and that 
earth is the only paradise men's eyes are like to see, it 
by no means follows that all the joys of existence must 
be summed in a short decade of lusty youth, while the 



Whittier. 225 

long vista of our later years is to be darkened with yain 
repining and regret. There would be truth in the pict- 
ure if egotism could be trusted to serve the purpose 
even of Epicurus, since selfishness dwells in the pas- 
sions and their heyday is indeed brief. But that com- 
mon sense of mankind which is content to accept 
without too curious dissection the record of its impres- 
sions, finds sympathy at the root of its profoundest joys, 
and accordingly recognizes the affections as the veritable 
ministrants of happiness. ISTow it is a singular fact 
that of those affections whose office it is to wish and 
further another's welfare or delight, there is scarcely a 
trace in that Earthly Paradise to which Morris would 
conduct us. It is true he veils with exquisite tact and 
delicacy the grosser aspects of physical passion, but, al- 
though his lovers do not smite with eyes, or scorch with 
hot, fierce lips, or gripe with hard embraces, as Mr. 
Swinburne's sometimes do, they obey the same animal 
instinct, and seem unable to conceive of an affection 
that should outlive desire. Stripped of its demure ac- 
cents and dainty dress, what is this but the philosophy 
of the sty ? Surely, not even a shrewd materialism 
could be held responsible for these deductions, much 
less such atheism as Shelley's, whose pure and lofty ethics 
dignified the human nature on which he based them. 

Had Whittier been moved to concentrate his energies 

upon the drama, it would have been incumbent on him 

to portray the passions, since they supply the shadows 

of life ; but, as a lyric bard, by impulse and habit, he 

10* 



226 Chats about Boohs. 

had a right to ignore them and constitute himself the 
laureate of the affections. Scarcely any poet of our 
day, if we except Wordsworth, has touched with more 
honest reverence and loving tenderness the relations of 
friendship, of marriage, of parent and child. Whittier, 
in brief, is truly, in Sidney's sense, a homilist. Those 
winning pictures of a peaceful home, its innocent joys, 
and sweet contentment, which Jeremy Taylor loved to 
draw, are not more wholesome and serene than his, 
while no manual of noble living can hit the springs of 
motive and mould the character like the subtle influ- 
ence of song. 



LORD BEACONSFIEL&S ENBTMION. 

That a new novel by the author of " Lothair " should 
have been simultaneously offered to American readers 
by no less than three publishers bears witness to the in- 
terest and curiosity which the remarkable career of the 
Conservative leader awakened on this side of the Atlan- 
tic. We do not mean, of course, that many of those 
who eagerly peruse "Endymion" care to trace in it the 
writer's political principles, or seek to evolve from its 
random allusions to public events the secret of his polit- 
ical success. But everybody appreciates the social 
triumphs of Lord Beaconsfield ; everybody feels that this 
man's life constitutes, in its social aspects, a romance 
more gorgeous and extravagant than any he himself has 
penned. There is another reason why his portrayal 
of what are commonly regarded as the highest spheres 
of English society was certain to be scanned with 
exceptional avidity. There is nothing which the Brit- 
ish middle class, or, for that matter, the majority of 
well-to-do Americans, regard with such keen inquisi- 
tiveness as the English aristocracy. The habits, man- 
ners, tastes, modes of thought, and modes of speech 
of that brilliant and envied caste are made the ob- 
jects of unremitting inquiry and imitation. Books that 
purport to deal with what is vulgarly called high life, 



228 Chats about Books, 

start with weighty credentials, as is proved by the 
simple test of sale. Experienced publishers will doubt- 
less bear us out in asserting the superior attractions of 
this theme from a commercial point of view. But the 
majority of works intended to gratify the popular craving 
for enlightenment on this head, and assuming to photo- 
graph the best English society, are discredited by grave 
doubts of the author's competence. The middle-class 
reader, whose naive and confiding attitude was a source 
of perpetual merriment to Thackeray, is now beset by a 
lurking apprehension that these glowing delineations of 
partrician existence are not instructive transcripts of 
reality, but delusive and useless products of a plebeian's 
imagination. For a too often victimized and justly 
suspicious audience it is plain that a novel written by a 
Knight of the Garter must have an incomparable charm. 
On the hints and examples gleaned from his authentic 
pages, the patient student of good manners, the ardent 
amateur of modish talk and genteel behavior, may build 
as on a rock. Indeed, Lord Beacon sfield's social studies 
are sure to be distinguished by a far more minute and 
instructive realism than would have characterized his 
work had he been born in the purple. There can be, 
from the nature of the case, no more alert, untiring, in- 
cisive, and exhaustive observer than a parvenu whose 
success has been in no sense due to wealth. An intui- 
tive swiftness in discerning and reproducing the subtlest 
shades of sentiment, and the nicest distinctions of speech 
and of demeanor peculiar to the world in which he is a 



Lord BeaconsfielcPs Endymion. 229 

stranger, is the inexorable condition of his naturalization 
in it. From this point of view it may be said that no 
novelist has been so thoroughly qualified to depict English 
Society as was Benjamin Disraeli, who was born, it may 
be said, outside of it, and who has conquered it with an al- 
most unexampled splendor and completeness of conquest. 
Those self -improving persons, however, who con one 
of Disraeli's novels as if it were an infallible manual of 
etiquette and a precious repository of conventional lore, 
will be in some measure disappointed by "Endymion." 
The society depicted in this novel is not contempora- 
neous, but separated from us by more than a genera- 
tion in point of time, and by a much wider gulf as 
regards the change in manners, customs and ideas. 
Eegarded as a storehouse of acute observations and 
shrewd comments, it would prove less useful to the 
student of existing types and standards than as a 
memoir e pour servir in the estimate of a past epoch. 
The story begins with the death of Canning, and ends, 
if we are justified in identifying the mysterious person- 
age variously designated as the " Count of Otranto " 
and " Col. Albert " with Louis Napoleon, some time 
after the establishment of the second empire in France. 
The main action of the story covers the years which 
intervened between the first reform act, and the dis- 
ruption of the Tory party after the repeal of the corn 
laws. The preceding period is but faintly outlined, 
while the allusions to events subsequent to 1848 are of a 
relatively casual and fugitive character, and suggest the 



230 Chats about Boohs. 

retouching of a substantially completed but unpublished 
work. At many points, too, in the main current of the 
narrative there are signs of revision on the part of the 
author, as if he wished to adjust statements and opin- 
ions to later and more accurate knowledge or to his 
present point of view. In general it may be said both 
of "Endymion" and "Lothair" that the writer deports 
himself with much more self-restraint and circumspec- 
tion, and is far less ready to occupy the seat of judg- 
ment than he was in his earlier books. His strictures 
are not so sweeping, so trenchant, or so confident. He 
does not pronounce on legislation and appraise the 
abilities of statesmen with the glibness of " Vivian 
Grey ;" he does not renovate society and settle the fate of 
empires with the complacency evinced in "Coningsby" 
and " Sibyl." In a word, his pen seems to have lost 
much of its old acridity, not to say gall and venom, 
since his own public life has been a target to the shafts 
of irony and satire. He seems to have arrived at the 
conclusion that a caustic vein is less discreet and 
sapient, as this world goes, than a relatively genial, 
tolerant, conciliatory strain. He writes in his last two 
novels much as well-bred men talk, fluently, tentatively, 
unpretentiously, unargumentatively. His opinions are 
hinted rather than expounded, brought out with the 
wary hesitation of the experienced politician who has 
learned that he may have at any moment to adopt 
measures previously rejected, and to accept as friends 
the enemies of yesterday. 



Lord BeaconsfieWs Endymion, 231 

Except in so far as it presents a record of its author's 
observations and reflections, and helps us to understand 
some phases of his own remarkable career, we cannot 
see that this new novel has much to recommend it. 
Considered as a work of art to be scrutinized and judged 
in comparison with the approved standards of novel 
writing, it is neither much better nor much worse than 
preceding ventures by the same hand in the same 
direction. Were " Endymion " the work of an utterly 
unknown writer, it might pique the curiosity of a few 
survivors of the period it depicts, because they would 
recognize in its author an habitue of their old world ; 
but we suspect that the mass of readers would pronounce 
it a dull book. We will risk, indeed, the assertion that 
few, even among those for whom Lord Beaconsfield him- 
self, and the society he paints, have a powerful fascination, 
have been able to finish either " Lothair " or " En- 
dymion " at a sitting. Of the specific qualities which ac- 
credit a first-rate novel, more than one is wanting in these 
stories. Of the several ways in which a literary artist 
may evince skill within this field, in construction, 
characterization, observation, comment, and that agree- 
able diction which is the indispensable vehicle of the 
whole, it is only in the three respects last named that 
Disraeli's novels have deserved much consideration. Of 
structure in the sense that a novel of Fielding or Balzac 
is structural ; of the nice inter-relation of parts to one 
another and to the central motive which unifies them 
all ; of the exquisite adaptation of incidents and situa- 



232 ' Chats about Boohs* 

tion to the swift, continuous unfolding of the plot ; 
there is scarcely an indication in " Endymion." In the 
first chapters of the tale we follow the declining for- 
tunes of the hero's family, while the remainder of the 
book reproduces not so much an epoch as a section of 
the hero's life ; a section hewn off in the rough, like a 
fragment of biography, not stamped with any dramatic 
or psychological completeness, unless the fact that 
Endymion becomes a cabinet minister can be deemed an 
artistic culmination of a romance. So far as the story 
of Endymion and his sister is concerned — and these, if 
any, are the pivotal figures — it might have been told in 
one quarter of the space occupied ; and if we are not 
repelled by the maladroit profusion of superfluous per- 
sons and irrelevant events, it is for reasons quite ex- 
trinsic to a candid appreciation of the author's technical 
proficiency in the task of tale-weaving. 

If now the reader looks to see exemplified in "Endy- 
mion " the conception and projection of character which 
we expect from a first-rate novelist, he will be, at first, 
a little perplexed and baffled by the aspect of realism, 
coupled with the absence of vitality, exhibited by the 
persons of the tale. The fact is that most of them give 
us upon close scrutiny, the impression of wax-work 
fac-similes of beings once alive, but now, to all intents 
and purposes, defunct. Our intellect accepts the fact 
of their historical existence, but our imagination does 
not recognize them as living, breathing things. We do 
not share their emotions, kindle with their hopes, thrill 



Lord Beaconsfield 's Endymion. 233 

with tlieir loves, droop with their sorrows, as we do for 
those palpitating figures warmed and quickened by the 
hand of truly creative genius. In a word, the cold, 
inert, eclectic realism exhibited in "Endymion " is, to 
the animated, glowing, profundi verity of such an artist 
as George Eliot, what a plaster cast reproducing a man's 
very lineaments would be to a portrait of the same face 
by Velasquez. We cannot bring ourselves to care much 
about the persons encountered in this novel, except so 
far as one of them is supposed in some respects to 
personate the author, or as others are indentified with 
people holding intimate or important relations to Mr. 
Disraeli, or with men and women of mark in the social 
and political history of this century. 

To say that a novelist is deficient in the power not 
only of construction but of characterization also, if the 
latter word be used in a high, creative sense, would in 
nine cases out of ten effectually dispose of his claims to 
serious attention. When we add that "Endymion" 
and its companion narratives are seldom enlivened by 
the jocund, sly, or cynical humor in which the works of 
Dickens, Thackeray, and Bret Harte are so rich, it 
might seem at first sight that the process of elimination 
had left behind little of substantial value. This, how- 
ever, would be a grave mistake. Lord Beaconsfield's 
experience has been so wide, and his natural astuteness 
of intellect has cooperated with circumstances to gener- 
ate such a fund of worldly wisdom, that his novels, 
aside from their autobiographical interest, constitute a 



234 Chats about Books. 

vast and incomparable treasury of useful information 
and sage suggestion. They will prove more helpful to 
the future student of the later Georgian and Victorian 
eras than even such books as Greville's memoirs, for 
the author's opportunities were far greater, and have 
been turned to very much better account, than Greville's. 
Indeed, we see no reason why Lord Beaconsfield's social 
studies, taken collectively, should not be looked upon 
hereafter as presenting a no less comprehensive and 
trustworthy tableau of London society in the nineteenth 
century than Balzac's Comedie Humaine is supposed to 
offer for the Paris of the Eestoration and of the reign 
of Louis Philippe. On the score of authenticity, 
indeed, few persons would dream of contesting the 
superior authority of the English writer, for although 
the naive etudiant of the Quartier Latin deems it 
pertinent and profitable to explore Paris in the pages of 
Balzac, there are those who smile at his credulity. 

While Lord Beaconsfield has much to tell us, he tells 
it in a singularly lucid and effective way. He can 
scarcely be credited with wit, for what might pass for 
wit in his writings lacks the flash, if not the sting ; but 
he has a gift of fashioning compact and memorable sen- 
tences in which the neatness of the phrase lends wings 
to the apt matter. His descriptive style in " Endymion " 
and " Lothair " is free, for the most part, from the arti- 
ficial, euphemistic tinge conspicuous in the earlier novels. 
It seems, by comparison, spontaneous and impersonal. 
It has a limpid current of its own, which recalls the 



Lord Beaconsfield' s Endymion. 235 

fluent, gentle murmur of discourse in a drawing-room. 
The obvious superiority of the present book in this re- 
spect oyer " Coningsby " attests how rigorous a revision 
the author must have lately given it, if it be, as we 
incline to think, a work whose first draught was made 
at least thirty years ago. When, on the other hand, the 
flow of description is interrupted by comment or collo- 
quy, the writer's thought perpetually tends to cast itself 
in laconic, pithy, epigrammatic form, ornamented with 
fit metaphor and pointed with not too far fetched an- 
tithesis. This, of course, was always a distinguishing 
feature of Disraeli's diction, whether in his literary work 
or in his spoken utterance. We think, indeed, that more 
crisp sayings could be culled from " Endymion " than 
from any of his previous publications. His judgments 
on men and things are less frequently couched, as we 
have said, in tones of sneer and sarcasm, but the 
irony, perhaps, is not less pungent because it is less pal- 
pable. 

It is natural enough that the reader should try to iden- 
tify the characters that figure in this story with this or 
that personage in real life, since this species of mechani- 
cal reproduction has always been Disraeli's forte, and is, 
indeed, the only kind of realism which we have learned 
to expect from him. Nor is it often difficult to discern 
whom the author has in mind in sketching a particular 
portrait, so far as the physical, mental, and moral traits 
are concerned, although he almost always seeks to foil 
and disconcert the inquisitive eye by some glaring incon- 



236 Chats about Boohs. 

gruity of circumstance. Endymion himself, for instance, 
from a psychological point of view, presents many obvi- 
ous points of likeness, if not to what young Disraeli was, 
yet to what Lord Beaconsfield would have us think he 
was. Nothing, however, could be more ludicrously irrec- 
oncilable with the facts of the author's career than cer- 
tain events in the life of " Endymion," such as his suc- 
cessively holding the relation of brother-in-law to Lord 
Palmerston and Louis Napoleon. If we except the ir- 
relevancy of some incidents, the delineation of Palmers- 
ton, under the name of Lord Eoehampton, seems, on the 
whole, more faithful and complete than any of the other 
attempts at photography, although the features of the 
Whig leader are a good deal refined, and nobody would 
guess that in real life Lord Eoehampton could be popu- 
larly known by the sobriquet of " Pam." The supposed 
recognition of Lord Melbourne behind^he mask of Lord 
Montfort appears to us a manifest blunder. There is 
scarcely anything in the public or private life of Mel- 
bourne which finds a counterpart in the description of 
Montfort, nor anything in his personal character, except 
possibly the listlessness which in Melbourne's case was 
affected, and never, as a matter of fact, hindered him 
from discharging official business. Neither can Mont- 
fort possibly be meant for Lord Normanby, though it is 
certain that Lady Montfort can be no other than the 
Marchioness of Normanby, the heroine of the famous 
question dejupons. That so great a dame as Lady Mont- 
fort should, at a later point of the story, be confounded 



Lord BeaconsfielcTs Endymion. 237 

with the estimable yet by no means equally distinguished 
lady whom Mr. Disraeli married, is an incongruity cred- 
itable enough to the author's conjugal affection. As 
for Montfort, while he has almost no points in common 
with Lord Normanby, there are many signs that the 
writer meant to reveal in him the veritable features of 
the Marquess of Hertford, the reader being expected to 
draw the obvious inference that Thackeray had no ac- 
quaintance with that nobleman, and relied exclusively on 
vulgar rumor, when he undertook to draw him in the 
person of the Marquis of Steyne. There is, it seems to 
us, in " Endymion " more than one covert insinuation 
levelled at the author of " Vanity Fair," and designed 
to depreciate that artist's esoteric knowledge of the great 
London world. Nor does the genius of Dickens fare 
much better at the hand of Lord Beaconsfield, if it be, 
as we surmise, that novelist who is made the object of 
occasional allusions under the name of " G-ushy." We 
take for granted that Thackeray sat for St. Barbe, al- 
though the likeness seems to have been purposely defaced 
out of deference to certain critics, with whom Thackeray 
has become a sort of fetish. In Nigel Penruddock we 
have a composite figure in whose features those who 
think it worth while may differentiate what belongs to 
Wiseman, what to Newman, and what to Manning. As 
for Eoebuck and Cobclen, they are limned with sufficient 
distinctness in "Jorrocks" and " Job Thornberry;" 
and other politicians, as well as divers men and women 
of fashion, may be detected without any great display of 



238 Chats about Boohs. 

acumen, by the reader who cares to know — not exactly 
Lord Beaconsfield's opinion of them, but so much of his 
opinion as he chooses to put into a noyel. 

In the effort to illustrate by excerpts the author's 
worldly knowledge and social philosophy — the scope and 
minuteness of his scrutiny and the shrewdness of his 
yerdicts — we are embarrassed to an extent not equalled 
or approached in any recent book by the redundancy of 
interesting material. There is scarcely a page, much 
less a chapter, which has not something in it likely to 
rivet the attention, some conclusion or suggestion not 
unapt to strike and occupy the historical student, politi- 
cian, social scientist, or man of the world. Perhaps we 
cannot do better than begin with the portrait of the ex- 
Queen Horfcense, who is somewhat grotesquely designated 
as " Agrippina." Inasmuch as the author takes the fa- 
vorable view of that lady's character lately propounded 
in Madame De Remusat's memoirs, it is plain that he 
disclaims for her the vices, while he surely would not 
assert for her the virile qualities of Nero's mother. Lord 
Beaconsfield's impressions, however, of Queen Hortense 
being derived from personal acquaintance, are well worth 
citing. 

The lady was fair and singularly thin. It seemed that her deli- 
cate hand must really be transparent. Her cheek was sunk, but 
the expression of her large brown eyes was inexpressibly pleasing. 
She wore her own hair, once the most celebrated in Europe, and 
still uncovered. Though the prodigal richness of the tresses had 
disappeared, the arrangement was still striking from its grace. 



Lord Beaconsfield' s Endymion. 239 

That rare quality pervaded the being of this lady, and it was im- 
possible not to be struck with her carriage as she advanced to meet 
her guest ; free from all affectation, and yet full of movement and 
gestures, which might have been the study of painters. 

Then follows an intimation that the charges of coarse 
depravity levelled by Madame de Kemusat at "the courts 
of the Consulate and the Empire are not, in Lord Bea- 
consfield's opinion^ by any means deseryed : 

"And I read," said the lady, a little indignant, "in some me- 
moirs the other day that our court was a corrupt and dissolute 
court. It was a court of pleasure, if you like ; but of pleasure 
that animated and refined, and put the world in good humor, which, 
after all, is good government. The most corrupt and dissolute 
courts on the Continent of Europe that I have known," said the 
lady, "have been outwardly the dullest and most decorous." 

" My memory of those days," said Mr. Wilton, " is of ceaseless 
grace and inexhaustible charm." 

"Well," said the lady, "if I sinned I have at least suffered. And 
I hope they were only sins of omission. I wanted to see everybody 
happy, and tried to make them so." 

On the signal change which has come oyer London 
society within the last fifty years, as regards comprehen- 
siveness and complexity, Lord Beaconsfield offers some 
remarks which, trite as the subject is, will repay atten- 
tion : 

The great world then, compared with the huge society of the 
present period, was limited in its proportions, and composed of 
elements more refined though far less various. It consisted mainly 
of the great landed aristocracy, who had quite absorbed the nabobs 
of India, and had nearly appropriated the huge West Indian fort- 



240 Chats about Books. 

unes. Occasionally an eminent banker or merchant invested a 
large portion of his accumulations in land, and in the purchase of 
Parliamentary influence, and was in time duly admitted into the 
sanctuary. But those vast and successful invasions of society by 
new classes which have since occurred, though impending, had not 
yet commenced. The manufacturers, the railway kings, the colos- 
sal contractors, the discoverers of nuggets, had not yet found their 
place in society and the senate. There were then, perhaps, more 
great houses open than at the present day, but there were very few 
little ones. The necessity of providing regular occasions for the 
assembling of the miscellaneous world of fashion led to the insti- 
tution of Almack's, which died out in the advent of the new system 
of society, and in the fierce competition of its inexhaustible private 
entertainments. 

Not only was society a much narrower and more ex- 
clusive thing when Endymion came up to the metropo- 
lis in the reign of " Sailor Bill," but London life in 
general was to the stranger, the lounger, to all, in fact, 
except the privileged habitues of a small patrician circle, 
decidedly tame and irksome. 

At this time London was a very dull city, instead of being, as it 
is now, a very amusing one. Probably there never was a city in 
the world with so vast a population which was so melancholy. The 
aristocracy probably have always found amusements adapted to 
the manners of the time and the age in which they lived. The 
middle classes half a century ago had little distraction from their 
monotonous toil and melancholy anxieties, except, perhaps, what 
they found in religious and philanthropic societies. Their general 
life must have been very dull. Some traditionary merriment al- 
ways lingered among the working classes of England. Both in 
town and country they had always their games and fairs and junk- 



Lord Beaconsfield's Endymion. 241 

eting parties, which have developed into excursion trains and 
colossal picnics. But of all classes of the community in the days 
of our fathers there was none so unfortunate in respect of public 
amusements as the bachelors about town. There were, one might 
almost say, only two theatres, and they so huge that it was difficult 
to see or hear in either. Their monopolies, no longer redeemed by 
the stately genius of the Kembles, the pathos of Miss O'Xeill, or 
the fiery passion of Kean, were already menaced, and were soon 
about to fall ; but the crowd of diminutive but sparkling substi- 
tutes which have since taken their place had not yet appeared, and 
half price at Drury Lane or Covent Garden was a dreary distrac- 
tion after a morning of desk work. There were no Alhambras 
then, and no Cremornes, no palaces of crystal in terraced gardens, 
no casinos, no music halls, no aquaria, no promenade concerts. 
Evans's existed, but not in the fulness of its modern development ; 
and the most popular place of resort was the barbarous conviviality 
of the Cider Cellar. 

Here is a description of the Anglican Church, as it 
was just before the outbreak of the Tractarian move- 
ment : 

The English Church had no competent leaders among the 
clergy. The spirit that has animated and disturbed our later 
times seemed quite dead, and no one anticipated its resurrection. 
The bishops had been selected from college dons, men profoundly 
ignorant of the condition and the wants of the country. To have 
edited a Greek play with second-rate success, or to have been the 
tutor of some considerable patrician, was the qualification then 
deemed desirable and sufficient for an office which at this day is at 
least reserved for eloquence and energy. The social influence of 
the Episcopal bench was nothing. A prelate was rarely seen in 
the saloons of Zenobia. It is since the depths of religious thought 
have been probed, and the influence of woman in the spread and 
11 



242 Chats about Boohs. 

sustenance of religious feeling has again been recognized, that fas- 
cinating and fashionable prelates have become favored guests in 
the refined saloons of the mighty, and, while apparently indulging 
in the vanities of the hour, have re-established the influence which 
in old days guided a Matilda or the mother of Constantine. 

Anct here is a remarkable passage in which the author 
makes a foreign diplomatist, talking in 1830, anticipate 
the profound transformation which has since taken 
place in the aims of the European revolutionary party. 
Although the speaker's language is manifestly warped 
by what we should now call conservative, not to say re- 
actionist tendencies, he yet distinguishes clearly between 
the Jacobin ideals, based as they were on the root con- 
ception of individualism, and the new principles and 
projects which, under the names of Saint Simonism, 
Fourierism, and Socialism, have to a large extent sup- 
planted them. 

"You know I am a Liberal, and have always been a Liberal," 
said the Baron ; "I know the value of civil and religious liberty, 
for I was born in a country where we had neither, and where we 
have since enjoyed either very fitfully. Nothing can be much 
drearier than the present lot of my country, and it is probable that 
these doings at Paris may help my friends a little, and they may 
again hold up their heads for a time ; but I have seen too much, 
and am too old, to indulge in dreams. You are a young man, and 
will live to see what I can only predict. The world is thinking of 
something else than civil and religious liberty. Those are phrases 
of the eighteenth century. The men who have won these ' three 
glorious days ' at Paris want neither civilization nor religion. They 
will not be content till they have destroyed both. It is possible 



Lord Beaconsfield's Endymion. 243 

that they may be parried for a time ; that the adroit wisdom of the 
house of Orleans, guided by Talleyrand, may give this movement 
the resemblance, and even the character, of a middle-class revolu- 
tion. It is no such thing ; the barricades were not erected by the 
middle class. I know these people ; it is a fraternity, not a nation. 
Europe is honeycombed with their secret societies. They are spread 
all over Spain. Italy is entirely mined. I know more of the 
Southern than the Northern nations, but I have been assured by 
one who should know that the brotherhood are organized through- 
out Germany and even in Russia. I have spoken to the Duke about 
these things. He is not indifferent, or altogether incredulous, but 
he is so essentially practical that he can only deal with what he 
sees. I have spoken to the Whig leaders. They tell me that 
there is only one specific and that a complete one — constitu- 
tional government : that with representative institutions secret 
societies cannot exist. I may be wrong, but it seems to me 
that with these secret societies representative institutions rather 
will disappear." 

There is a great deal in this book about the 
Rothschilds, who figure as the "Neu chat els." It was 
natural, perhaps, that the son of Isaac Disraeli should 
speak in a highly appreciative, not to say obsequious 
tone, of the great Hebrew banking house. Every phase 
and incident of their striking history, undergoes in his 
hands a softening process, whose keynote is struck in 
making their founder issue from a Swiss town instead of 
the Frankfort Ghetto. Here is the expurgated story of 
their beginnings : 

One of the most remarkable families that have ever flourished 
in England were the Neuchatels. Their founder was a Swiss, who 
had established a banking house of high repute in England in the 



244 Chats ctbout Boohs. 

latter part of the eighteenth century, and, irrespective of a power- 
ful domestic connection, had in time pretty well engrossed the 
largest and best portion of foreign banking business. When the 
great French revolution occurred, all the emigrants deposited their 
jewels and their treasure with the Neuchatels. As the disturbances 
spread, their example was followed by the alarmed proprietors and 
capitalists of the rest of Europe : and, independently of their own 
considerable means, the Neuchatels thus had the command for a 
quarter of a century, more or less, of adventitious millions. They 
were scrupulous and faithful stewards; but they were doubtless 
• repaid for their vigilance, their anxiety, and often their risk, by 
the opportunities which these rare resources permitted them to 
enjoy. One of the Neuchatels was a favorite of Mr. Pitt, and 
assisted the great statesman in his vast financial arrangements. This 
Neuehatel was a man of large capacity, and thoroughly understood 
his period. The Minister wished to introduce him to public life, 
would have opened Parliament to him, and no doubt have showered 
on him honors and titles. But Neuchatel declined these overtures. 
He was one of those strong minds who will concentrate their ener- 
gies on one object ; without personal vanity, but with a deep seated 
pride in the future. He was always preparing for his posterity. 
Governed by this passion, although he himself would have been 
content to live forever in Bishopsgate street, where he was born, 
he had become possessed of a vast principality, which, strange to 
say, with every advantage of splendor and natural beauty, was not 
an hour's drive from Whitechapel. 

The Elder " JSTeuchatel " departed this life, we are 
told, a little before the second French revolution of 
1830, and it is his eldest son and successor, "Adrian," 
of whom we hear continually in this novel : 

Adrian had inherited something more, and something more 
precious, than his father's treasure — a not inferior capacity, united 



Lord BeaconsjielcVs Endymion. 245 

in his case, with much culture, and with a worldly ambition to 
which his father was a stranger. * * * 

Adrian purchased a very fine mansion in Portland Place, and 
took up his residence formally at Hainault. He delighted in the 
place, and to dwell there in a manner becoming the scene had 
always been one of his dreams. Now he lived there with un- 
bounded expenditure. * * * 

Sunday was always a great day at Hainault. The Royal and the 
Stock Exchanges were both of them always fully represented ; and 
then they often had an opportunity, which they highly appreciated, 
of seeing and conferring with some public characters, M. P.'s of 
note or promise, and occasionally a secretary of the treasury or a 
privy councillor. "Turtle makes all men equal," Adrian would 
observe. "Our friend Trodgits seemed a little embarrassed at 
first when I introduced him to the Right Honorable ; but when 
they sat next each other at dinner they soon got on very well." 

Endymion's sister, Myra, becomes a governess in the 
banker's family, and with her we are introduced to the 
Neuchatel household : 

She was much diverted by the gentlemen of the Stock Exchange, 
so acute, so audacious, and differing so much from the merchants 
in the style even of their dress, and in the ease, perhaps the too 
great facility, of their bearing. They called each other by their 
Christian names, and there were allusions to practical jokes which 
intimated a life something between a public school and a garrison. 
On more solemn days there were diplomatists and men in public 
office ; sometimes great musical artists, and occasionally a French 
actor. But the dinners were always the same ; dishes worthy of 
the great days of the Bourbons, and wines of rarity and price, 
which could not ruin Neucbatel, for in many instances the vineyards 



246 Chats about Books. 

One of Endymion's friends, Mr. St. Barbe, who is a 
sour, conceited, heretofore unsuccessful man of letters, 
dines one evening at the " Neuchatels', " and if any 
reader doubts that Thackeray was the original of this 
gentleman, let him ponder the following paragraphs : 

St. Barbe was not disappointed in his hopes. It was an evening 
of glorious success for him. He had even the honor of sitting for 
a time by the side of Mrs. Neuchatel, and being full of good claret, 
he, as he phrased it, showed his paces : this is to say, delivered 
himself of some sarcastic paradoxes duly blended with fulsome 
flattery. Later in the evening he contrived to be presented both 
to the Ambassador and the Cabinet Minister, and treated them as 
if they were demigods ; listened to them as if with an admiration 
which he vainly endeavored to repress ; never spoke except to en- 
force and illustrate the views which they had condescended to inti- 
mate ; successfully conveyed to his Excellency that he was convers- 
ing with an enthusiast for his exalted profession ; and to the Minister 
that he had met an ardent sympathizer with his noble career. * * 

"I have done business to-night," said St. Barbe to Endymion 
toward the close of the evening. "Foreign affairs are all the 
future, and my views may be as right as anybody else's ; probably 
more correct, not so conventional. What a fool T was, Ferrars ! 
I was asked to remain here to-night, and refused ! The truth is, I 
could not stand those powdered gentlemen, and I should have been 
under their care. They seem so haughty and supercilious. And 
yet I was wrong. I spoke to one of them very rudely just now, 
when he was handing coffee, to show I was not afraid, and he an- 
swered me like a seraph. I felt remorse." 

That touch about the flunkies is unmistakable. And 
here is another patent allusion to the author of the 
" Yellowplush Papers " in the account of St. Barbe's 



Lord Beaconsfield's Endymion. 247 

later years, when that novelist's works had proved suc- 
cessful, and he was going about a good deal among what 
he called the big wigs. The words put into St. Barbe's 
mouth could only have been pronounced by Thackeray : 

We must not forget our old friend St. Barbe. Whether he had 
written himself out or had become lazy in the luxurious life in 
which he now indulged, he rarely appealed to the literary public, 
which still admired him. He was always intimating that he was 
engaged in a great work, which, though written in his taking prose, 
was to be really the epopee of social life in this country. Dining 
out every day, and ever arriving, however late, at those "small 
and earlies " which he once despised, he gave to his friends frequent 
intimations that he was not there for pleasure, but rather following 
his profession; he was in his studio, observing and reflecting on 
all the passions and manners of mankind, and gathering materials 
for the great work which was eventually to enchant and instruct 
society and immortalize his name. 

" The fact is, I wrote too early," he would say. ' ' I blush when 
I read my own books, though compared with those of the brethren 
they might still be looked on as classics. They say no artist can 
draw a camel, and I say no author ever drew a gentleman. How 
can they, with no opportunity of ever seeing one? And so, with a 
little caricature of manners, which they catch second-hand, they 
are obliged to have recourse to outrageous nonsense, as if polished 
life consisted only of bigamists, and ladies of fashion were in the 
habit of paying blackmail to returned convicts. However, I shall 
put an end to all this. I have now got the materials, or am ac- 
cumulating them daily. You hint that I give myself up too much 
to society. You are talking of things you do not understand. A 
dinner-party is a chapter. I catch the Cynthia of the minute, sir, 
at a soiree. If I only served a grateful country, I should be in the 
proudest position of any of its sons ; if I had been born in any 



248 Chats about Boohs. 

country but this, I should have been decorated, and perhaps made 
Secretary of State like Addison, who did not write as well as I do, 
though his style somewhat resembles mine." 

During the greater part of the story Lord Palmerston 
is constantly in the foreground under the name of the 
Earl of Roehampton, who by an extraordinary diver- 
gence from biographical fact, is made to marry a sister 
of Endymion (Disraeli). Here is one of the autho""' 
comments on the great Whig minister : 

The Earl of Roehampton was the strongest member of the Gov- 
ernment, except, of course, the premier himself. He was the man 
from whose combined force and flexibility of character the country 
had confidence that in all their councils there would be no lack of 
courage, yet tempered with adroit discretion. Lord Roehampton, 
though an Englishman, was an Irish peer, and was resolved to 
remain so, for he fully appreciated the position which united so- 
cial distinction with the power of a seat in the House of Commons. 
He was a very ambitious, and, as it was thought, worldly man, 
deemed even by many to be unscrupulous, and yet he was roman- 
tic. A great favorite in society, and especially with the softer 
sex, somewhat late in life he had married suddenly a beautiful 
woman, who was without fortune, and not a member of the en- 
chanted circle in which he flourished. 

And this is what the banker Neuchatel (Rothschild) 
said of him : 

I like Lord Roehampton, and, between ourselves, I wish he were 
First Minister. He understands the Continent, and would keep 
things quiet. But, do you know, Miss Ferrars, with all his play- 
ful, good-tempered manner, as if he could not say a cross word or 
do an unkind act, he is a very severe man in business. Speak to 



Lord BeaconsfieWs Endymion. - 249 

him on business, and he is completely changed. His brows knit, 
he penetrates you with the terrible scrutiny of that deep-set eye: 
he is more than stately, he is austere. I have been up to him 
with deputations — the governor of the bank, and all the first men 
in the city, half of them M. P.'s, and they trembled before him 
like aspens. 

After the death of Lord Roehampton, his widow is in- 
yited to share the throne of a sovereign (Louis Napo- 
leon), of whom, under the titles of Count of Otranto and 
Prince Floristan, and the pseudonym of Col. Albert 
we hear a good deal in this novel. He was much at 
Hainault House, having some secret business with Mr. 
Neuchatel, and he was liked, we are told, by the female 
members of the banker's family. 

And yet it cannot be said that he was entertaining, but there are 
some silent people who are more interesting than the best talkers. 
And when he did speak he always said the right thing. His man- 
ners were tender and gentle ; he had an unobtrusive sympathy 
with all they said or did, except, indeed, and that was not rarely, 
when he was lost in profound abstraction. 

Endymion's sister, who before her first marriage, was 
domiciled at Hainault, used to insist that " Colonel Al- 
bert " had a " good heart : " 

"They say he is the most unscrupulous of living men," said Mr. 
Neuchatel, with his peculiar smile. 

"Perhaps he is the most determined," said Myra. "Moral 
courage is the rarest of qualities, and often maligned." 

From a Baron Sergius,' the chief confidant and adviser 

of Colonel Albert during his exile, Endymion received 
11* 



250 Chats about Boohs, 

the following impression of the French adventurer's 
character : 

"The Prince rarely gives an opinion," said the Baron. "In- 
deed, as yon well know, he rarely speaks, he thinks and he acts." 

"But if he acts on wrong information," continued Endymion, 
"there will probably be only one consequence." 

"The Prince is very wise," said the Baron, "and, trust me, 
knows as much about mankind and the varieties of mankind as any 
one. He may not believe in the Latin race, but he may choose to 
use those who do believe in it. The weakness of the Prince, if he 
have one, is not want of knowledge or want of judgment, but an 
over confidence in his star, which sometimes seduces him into en- 
terprises which he himself feels at the time are not perfectly 
sound." 

Apropos of Louis Napoleon, it is interesting to note 
what his counterpart in this noyel is made to say about 
us after his return from a compulsory yisit to the United 
States : 

" I suppose their society is like the best society in Manchester?" 
said Lord Roehampton. 

"It varies indifferent cities," said Colonel Albert. "In some 
there is considerable culture, and then refinement of life always 
follows. 

" Yes, but whatever they may be, they will always be colonial. 
What is colonial necessarily lacks originality. A country that 
borrows its language, its laws, and its religion, cannot have its in- 
ventive powers much developed. They got civilized very soon, but 
their civilization was second-hand." 

" Perhaps their inventive powers may develop themselves in 
other ways," said the Prince. " A nation has a fixed quantity of 
invention, and it will make itself felt." 



Lord BeaconsfielcVs Endymion. 251 

Another impressive personage stalks now and then 
across the stage ; this is the Count of Ferroll, in whom 
the most careless reader cannot help recognizing Bis- 
marck. When this book is perused upon the Continent 
no passage, probably, will be scanned with more curi- 
osity than Lord Beaconsfield's description of the pro- 
spective Chancellor : 

The Count of Ferroll was a young man, and yet inclined to be 
bald. He was chief of a not inconsiderable mission at our court. 
Though not to be described as a handsome man, his countenance 
was striking ; a brow of much intellectual development, and a 
massive jaw. He was tall, broad-shouldered, with a slender waist. 
He greeted Endymion with a penetrating glance, and then with a 
winning smile. 

The Count of Ferroll was the representative of a kingdom which, 
if not exactly created, had been moulded into a certain form of 
apparent strength and importance by the Congress of Vienna. He 
was a noble of considerable estate in a country where possessions 
were not extensive or fortunes large, though it was ruled by an 
ancient and haughty and warlike aristocracy. Like his class, the 
Count of Ferroll had received a military education ; but when that 
education was completed, he found but a feeble prospect of his 
acquirements being called into action. It was believed that the 
age of great wars had ceased, and that even revolutions were for 
the future to be controlled by diplomacy. As he was a man of an 
original, not to say eccentric, turn of mind, the Count of Ferroll 
was not contented with the resources and distraction of his second- 
rate capital. He was an eminent sportsman, and for some time 
took refuge and found excitement in the breadth of his dark forests, 
and in the formation of a stud, which had already become cele- 
brated. But at this time, even in the excitement of the chase, and 
in the raising of his rare-bred steeds, the Count of Ferroll might 



252 Chats about Books. 

be said to have been brooding over the position of what he could 
scarcely call his country, but rather an aggregation of lands bap- 
tized by protocols, and christened and consolidated, by treaties, 
which he looked upon as eminently untrustworthy. One day he 
surprised his sovereign, with whom he was a favorite, by requesting 
to be appointed to the legation at London, which was vacant. 

The Count of Ferroll now and then bestows some sug- 
gestions on Endymion. Here is one of them ■ 

"You will find it of the first importance in public life," said the 
Count of Ferroll, " to know personally those who are carrying on 
the business of the world, so much depends on the character of an 
individual, his habits of thought, his prejudices, his superstitions, 
his social weaknesses, his health. Conducting affairs without this 
advantage is, in effect, an affair of stationery ; it is pens and 
paper who are in communication, not human beings." 

In the next excerpt the Count of Ferroll is made to 
review the state of Europe not long before the outbreak 
of the revolution of 1848. He is speaking to Lady 
Montfort : 

"Everything is quite rotten throughout the Continent. This 
year is tranquillity to what the next will be. There is not a throne 
in Europe worth a year's purchase. My worthy master wants me 
to return home and be Minister. I am to fashion for him a new 
constitution. I will never have anything to do with new constitu- 
tions ; their inventors are always the first victims. Instead of 
making a constitution, he should make a country, and convert his 
heterogeneous domains into a patriotic dominion." 

" But how is that to be done ?" 

" There is only one way ; by blood and iron." 



Lord B eac on sft eld's Endymion. 253 

" My dear Count, you shock me ! " 

" I shall have to shock you a great deal more before the inevitable 
is brought about." 

The portrait of Poole, the tailor, as he was at the 
apogee of his career, will be promptly recognized by those 
who had the pleasure of that distinguished man's ac- 
quaintance in the later years of his useful life. It was 
Endymion's good- fortune, as it has been, we believe, that 
of other promising youth, to be sumptuously clothed for 
some years by Mr. Poole on the credit of their future. 

That friend was no common person; he was Mr. Vigo, by birth a 
Yorkshireman, and gifted with all the attributes, physical and in- 
tellectual, of that celebrated race. At present he was the most 
fashionable tailor in London, and one whom many persons con- 
sulted. Besides being consummate in his art, Mr. Vigo had the 
reputation of being a man of singularly good judgment. He was 
one who obtained influence over all with whom he came in contact, 
and as his business placed him in contact with various classes, but 
especially with the class socially most distinguished, his influence 
was great. The golden youth who repaired to his counters came 
there not merely to obtain raiment of the best material and the 
most perfect cut, but to see and talk with Mr. Vigo, and to ask his 
opinion on various points. There was a spacious room where, if 
they liked, they might smoke a cigar, and "Vigo's cigars" were 
something which no one could rival. If they liked to take a glass 
of hock with their tobacco, there was a bottle ready from the cel- 
lars of Johannisberg. Mr. Vigo's stable was almost as famous as 
its master ; he drove the finest horses in London, and rode the best 
hunters in the Vale of Aylesbury. Without this, his manners were 
exactly what they should be. He was neither pretentious nor ser- 
vile, but simple, and with becoming respect for others and for him- 



254 Chats about Books. 

self. He never took a liberty with any one, and such treatment, 
as is generally the case, was reciprocal. 

As we have said, the somewhat carefully drawn figure 
of Lord Montfort suggests the ironical design of con- 
trasting the veritable lineaments of Lord Hertford with 
the apocryphal traits assigned by Thackeray to the Mar- 
quis of Steyne. It was, perhaps, with the same purpose 
of raillery that in this book " St. Barbe," in whom 
Thackeray is but thinly veiled, is introduced for the first 
time to Lord Montfort, after his novel, " Topsy Turvy" 
("Vanity Pair") had been given to the world. Humor- 
ously, too, Lord Montfort is represented as reading 
" Topsy Turvy " with uncommon pleasure. Of the same 
nobleman we are told that he suddenly left his country 
without giving any one notice of his intentions, and en- 
tered into and fulfilled a vast scheme of adventurous 
travel — an incident in the actual career of the Marquess 
of Hertford. " His flag had floated in the Indian Ocean, 
and he had penetrated the dazzling mysteries of Brazil- 
ian forests." He was "heard of in every capital except 
his own — wonderful exploits at St. Petersburg and Paris 
and Madrid, deeds of mark at Vienna, and eccentric ad- 
ventures at Eome." At last it would appear that the 
restless Lord Montfort — again like the nobleman whom 
Balzac drew in " Lord Seymour," and in whom Thack- 
eray thought he discerned " Lord Steyne " — had found 
his true place, and that place was Paris. There he 
" dwelt for years in Sybaritic seclusion. He built him- 



Lord BeaconsfielcTs Endymion. 255 

self a palace, which he called a yilla, and which was the 
most fanciful of structures, and full of eyery beautiful 
object which rare taste and boundless wealth could pro- 
cure, from undoubted Eaphaels to jeweled toys." It 
was said that Lord Montfort saw no one ; he certainly 
did not " court, or receiye his countrymen, and this, 
perhaps, gayerise to, or at least caused to be exaggerated, 
the tales that were rife of his profusion, and eyen his 
profligacy." But according to Lord Beaconsfield he was 
not entirely isolated : 

He lived much with the old families of France in their haughty 
faubourg, and was highly considered by them. It was truly a 
circle for which he was adapted. Lord Montfort was the only 
living Englishman who gave one an idea of the nobleman of the 
eighteenth century. He was totally devoid of the sense of respon- 
sibility, and he looked what he resembled. His manner, though 
simple and natural, was finished and refined, and free from for- 
bidding reserve, was yet characterized by an air of serious grace. 

There was no subject, divine or human, in which he took the 
slightest interest. He entertained for human nature generally, 
and without any exception, the most cynical appreciation. He 
had a sincere and profound conviction that no man or woman ever 
acted except from selfish or interested motives. Society was 
intolerable to him — that of his own sex and station wearisome 
beyond expression ; their conversation consisted only of two sub- 
jects, horses and women, and he had long exhausted both. As for 
female society, if they were ladies, it was expected that, in some 
form or other, he should make love to them, and he had no 
sentiment. If he took refuge in the demi-monde, he encountered 
vulgarity, and that to Lord Montfort was insufferable. He had 



256 Chats about Books. 

tried them in every capital, and vulgarity was the badge of all 
their tribe. He had attempted to read ; a woman had told him to 
read French novels, but he found them only a clumsy representa- 
tion of the life which for years he had practically been lead- 
ing. * * * 

No one could say Lord Montfort was a bad-hearted man, for he 
had no heart. He was good-natured, provided it brought him no 
inconvenience ; and as for temper, his was never disturbed, but 
this not from sweetness of disposition, rather from a contemptuous 
fine taste, which assured him that a gentleman should never be 
deprived of tranquillity in a world where nothing was of the 
slightest consequence. 

It must be owned, we think, that Balzac's sketch is 
dim, and Thackeray's coarse, beside this picture, which 
has the fine lines and the subtle half shades of life. 

We have room for one more citation. In this para- 
graph Lord Beaconsfield touches on a theme with which 
he should be preeminently conversant — the influence of 
the Semitic race : 

The Semites are unquestionably a great race, for among the 
few things in this world which appear to be certain, nothing is 
more sure than that they invented our alphabet. But the Semites 
now exercise a vast influence over affairs by their smallest though 
most peculiar family, the Jews. There is no race gifted with so 
much tenacity and such skill in organization. These qualities 
have given them an unprecedented hold over property and illimit- 
able credit. As you advance in life, and get experience in affairs, 
the Jews will cross you everywhere. They have long been stealing 
into our secret diplomacy, which they have almost appropriated ; in 
another quarter of a century they will claim their share of open 
government. Well, there are races, men and bodies of men in- 



Lord BeaconafieliTs Enclymion. 257 

fluenced in their conduct by their particular organization, and 
which must enter into all the calculations of a statesman. But 
what do they mean by the Latin race ? Language and religion do 
not make a race. There is only one. thing which makes a race and 
that is blood. 

Most persons will find it hard to accept, or even to 
understand, the definition propounded in the last sen- 
tence. So far as the term race means anything deserving 
the attention of the thinker or the statesman, it denotes 
something more than mere congenial proclivities, which 
may be checked, warped, and ultimately effaced by a 
change of circumstances. It seems to postulate cohesion, 
cooperation, community of sentiments, identity of in- 
terests. These attributes of a people are generated by 
the pressure of a common language, a common religion, 
and common geographical boundaries rather than by 
any evanescent affinities of blood. What is it but lan- 
guage and religion which has hindered the Poles from 
coalescing with their fellow Slavs of Muscovy ? What 
weighty agency now exists, except a difference of lan- 
guage, to hold back Portugal from fusion with the main 
body of the Iberian peninsula ? What is it but a differ- 
ence of religion which has kept the Catholic Celts of Ire- 
land radically separate from the kindred Celts who, hav- 
ing once migrated from Ireland to Scotland, came back 
again to occupy the province of Ulster ? And what has 
developed in the Jews themselves the tenacity of pur- 
pose and capacity of organization to which Lord Bea- 
consfield adverts, but the maintenance of their national 



258 Chats about Books. 

faith, and, so far as Hebrew is retained in their relig- 
ious services, of their national language ? 

As we lay down this book we feel that the choice of 
title, which at first struck us as fantastic, is sufficiently 
apposite. With all the author's worldly wisdom and 
political sagacity, he has giyen us in " Endymion " a 
very sentimental book. Has he ever given us anything 
else, and is not this tender, sympathetic accent, which 
is scarcely drowned even in his cynical affectations, the 
keynote of his character, and the secret of his conquest 
of society ? From one point of view this latest novel 
might be termed the apotheosis of woman, considered as 
a social and political force. It is not one goddess only 
who deigns to look on this Endymion, but three god- 
desses who vie with one another in assuring to the lucky 
youth a place among the immortals., "Women," his 
sister tells him in the days of his obscurity, "will be 
your best friends in life ; " and really it seems that to 
this sister, or to Lady Montfort, or to Adriana Neucha- 
tel, or to Lady Beaumaris every step of his advancement 
muste^ge&ited. If this story can be regarded as in 
any seiSHiutobiographical, it must be owned that the 
author's ac^Bwledgment of his profound indebtedness 
to women presents a curious psychological phenomenon. 
We should scarcely look for it from a proud man, though 
we might expect it from a vain man. Those, however, 
who are familiar with the prejudice against men of Is- 
raelite origin, which not long ago was rampant and is 
still rife in English society, will appreciate the self-corn- 



Lord BeaconsftelcVs Endymion. 259 

placency which recalls how a Hebrew youth found fayor 
with the daughters of the Philistines. After all, the 
main thing which concerns us in this matter of the al- 
leged influence of women is not the good taste but the 
truth of Lord Beacon sfield's assertion. Are women such 
potent factors in the shaping not only of man's social 
but of his political career ? Balzac said they were ; in- 
deed, the paradox is unceasingly developed in the Come- 
die Humaine. And now a far higher authority than the 
French novelist comes forward in a narrative wherein 
readers are invited, or at least not forbidden, to trace 
the story of his life, and lends the weight of his obser- 
vation and striking personal experience to the unmeas- 
ured exaltation of woman's importance in the world. 



NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 

We do not think that Mr. Henry James, jr., has in- 
creased his reputation "by his life of Hawthorne, which 
forms a volume in the series of "English Men of Let- 
ters." Neither as a biography nor as a critical estimate 
is this book satisfactory. It tells us nothing about Haw- 
thorne's private circumstances with which we were pre- 
viously unacquainted, although there is much we need 
to know in order to comprehend the peculiar character 
of the man. It supplies us with no definite and ex- 
haustive conception of his intellectual acquirements and 
capacities ; indeed, we derive from its perusal an impres- 
sion much more meagre, fractional, and nebulous than we 
gained from Mr. Lathrop's memoir. When we consider 
the responsibilities imposed on a new biographer of Haw- 
thorne, and the opportunities offered for fresh, trench- 
ant, and candid criticism, the shortcomings of this per- 
formance are not easily explicable on grounds creditable 
to the writer. We cannot well escape the inference that 
the aim of this undertaking was not so much a patient, 
unflinching exposition of the subject as an elaborate 
display of the literary faculty on the part of the biog- 
rapher. There is ample proof in every chapter, and, 
for that matter, in every page, of a fact with which we 

were conversant, namely, that the writer is an expert in 

260 



Nathaniel Hawthorne. 261 

the art of verbal expression, that he understands better 
than most of his American contemporaries the use of 
the file, and. that his work, however wanting in breadth 
and solidity, will always be deftly joined and laboriously 
polished. But of new facts there is a total dearth, and 
of new ideas there is an almost equal scarcity. If robust, 
teemful thought and uncompromising utterance formed 
the core of his achievement, there would be something 
fine in the punctilious precision and finish of his style ; 
as it is, there is something finical. 

We imagine the disappointment encountered in this 
volume may be traced to the fundamental principle 
which governs Mr. James's literary methods, and to the 
models which he obviously keeps in view. Were it pos- 
sible, without injustice, to characterize him in a word, 
we might call him a victim of Sainte-Beuye. The 
blended social and artistic importance of the French 
critic seems to have suggested a studious reproduction 
of his processes with the somewhat credulous hope of 
compassing an analogous success. Had he appealed, 
however, to an English or an American audience, Sainte- 
Beuve himself would probably have invented a different 
system ; or, failing to adjust his tone and posture to his 
environment, he must have contented himself with the 
circumscribed and superficial influence exercised by 
Matthew Arnold. There is something repugnant to 
the Anglo-Saxon temper in the cautious, sly, evasive, 
equivocal attitude of Sainte-Beuve, We incline to with- 
hold confidence from those who deal exclusively in cir- 



262 Chats alout Boohs. 

cumlocutions, approximations, insinuations, who nibble 
at the edges or nutter round the surface of an idea, who 
prefer skirmish to close fighting, who are too nervous 
for straight thrusts, too dainty for hard blows. Ameri- 
cans do not appreciate critics who seem to keep one eye 
on the truth and another on their social status. We 
have no time to waste in detecting between the lines 
what a writer has scrupled to avow lest it might affect 
his standing in somebody's drawing room. For us, the 
worth of Sainte-Beuve's sentences is measured by their 
obvious purport, by their positive illuminating value, 
and we cannot be expected to heed the dexterity with 
which he could infuse a hint of censure or imbed a sting 
of calumny without imperilling for a moment his pros- 
pect of a seat in the Academy, or his hold on certain 
salons of the Faubourg St. Honore. We do not care to 
see autopsies performed with white kid gloves, or to 
watch the objects of a just severity or a secret spite 
done to death with drops of venom through a process 
of subcutaneous injection. The truth about Sainte- 
Beuve is that he was an unconscionable, but extremely 
astute, egoist, with a strong dash of poltroonery in his 
composition, who wrote criticism because he had the 
good sense to recognize, after experiment, that he could 
write nothing else, and who learned to manipulate the 
pen so as to make it at once a means of livelihood, a 
lever of social advancement, and an instrument of pri- 
vate vengeance. Voltaire, before him, had managed to 
elicit all this from literature ; but the striking and orig- 



Nathaniel Hawthorne. 263 

inal feature of Sainte-Beuve's process was his habitual 
employment of periphrasis and innuendo — the inimitable 
skill with which, behind the affectation of exaggerated 
equity and exquisite breeding, he contriyed to slake his 
priyate pique and depreciate his riyals with impunity. 
In the hands of other men the pen had been made a 
sword, but Sainte-Beuve was the first to make it at once 
an air gun and a rampart. When he meant to say a 
sharp or ungenerous thing, he was always careful to so 
arrange things that, in case his adyersary showed fight, 
he could plead non vult, or set up an alibi. 

The reproduction of Sainte-Beuve's attitude and 
tactics by American critics would be, we should say, a 
blunder, eyen from an egoistic point of yiew. There is 
among us no august fraternity like the Immortal Forty, 
whose suffrages a prudent writer might hesitate to 
estrange by a too aggressive or cynical demeanor, nor 
are there any drawing-rooms exile from which would 
wear the paralyzing terrors of social annihilation. There 
is, indeed, a grotesque, a ludicrous incongruity in the ap- 
plication of Sainte-Beuvian methods to a raw and chaotic 
society, to a puny, callow, and amorphous literature. 
To be in the least appropriate or helpful our American 
criticism must borrow the manner of the pedagogue, 
and not that of the courtier ; we need plain speech, not 
pretty speech ; the truth must be hammered and not 
filtered into us. It might do us good, for instance, to 
have Edgar Poe once more in the chair of judgment, 
although Mr. James pronounces his opinions vulgar and 



264 Chats about Boohs. 

provincial. We are all provincial, perhaps vulgar, and 
why should we be scared by words which Mr. Matthew Ar- 
nold hints are also applicable to cbntemporary England ? 
If to be a blunt; downright truth seeker and truth 
teller, if to follow methods the precise converse of those 
practised by Sainte-Beuve and his disciples, be a sign 
of vulgarity, then we can only wish that Carlyle, Kus- 
kin, Christopher North, and Edgar Poe may find a horde 
of equally barbarous successors to save us from the in- 
cubus of cosmopolitan hyper-elegance. 

The Sainte-Beuvian treatment applied to the career 
and character of Hawthorne could hardly fail to be par- 
ticularly sterile. The key to Hawthorne's intellectual 
and aesthetic shortcomings is probably to be found in 
his defective education, and the cramped and arid as- 
pect of the social world in which he lived. These draw- 
backs, there is reason to believe, were aggravated by 
poverty. Now, why should not Mr. James have searched 
out, and spoken out, the truth on all these matters ? 
Instead of talking about the petty colonial offices held 
by some of Hawthorne's progenitors a century and a half 
before his birth, and aiming to trace the moral cast and, 
drift of the novelist's mind to such remote and legend- 
ary sources, he might have given us more pertinent and 
trustworthy material by setting forth the humble lives 
of his subject's parents and grandparents. Inasmuch, 
too, as we see Hawthorne in pecuniary straits after his 
books began to earn something, we should have liked to 
know now he managed to keep the wolf from the door 



Nathaniel Hawthorne. 265 

during the thirty-five or forty years preceding. How did 
he subsist, for instance, at Bowdoin College ? Was it by 
keeping school in the vacations, or was it by incurring 
debts ? Who paid for his breakfasts and dinners dur- 
ing -the dozen years which he is represented as spend- 
ing in his Salem bedroom, immersed in lonely medita- 
tion, and where, according to his own statement, "fame 
was born ? " What did the newspapers and magazines 
of the time pay for his stories, and what did his pub- 
lisher give him for " The Scarlet Letter ?" Why is he 
portrayed by his biographer as being constrained to 
write for a livelihood in the last years of his life, after 
his return from Europe, where he had held the most 
lucrative consulate in the gift of the government ? 
What were his habits as the steward of a family and the 
master of a household ? Did he shoulder a man's re- 
sponsibilities like a man, or did he shirk them — let us 
say, like a novelist ? What cause associated with his 
private circumstances or his personal experience is 
chargeable with the extraordinary diffidence which Haw- 
thorne exhibited up to his last sojourn in England in 
the company of ladies and in general society ? Is there 
any record in his life of acts of remarkable generosity 
or self-sacrifice on behalf of his sisters or his friends ? 
Did he leave a profound impression of ability in conver- 
sation and chance intercourse ? These are questions 
which must be answered, if we would know something 
of the man as distinguished from the literary artist ; 

and the putting of such queries is not reckoned either 
12 



266 Chats about Boohs. 

yulgar or provincial in the case of Keats and Shelley, 
of Goldsmith and Dr. Johnson. 

We note a like curious reluctance on the part of Mr. 
James to recognize or to disclose the extremely slender 
outfit of mental furniture with which Hawthorne under- 
took the literary vocation. We are told, for example, 
that he graduated at Bowdoin College, a statement not 
unlikely to mislead an English reader. Nevertheless 
the biographer does not mark, except in a vague and 
cursory way, the small significance of that performance. 
In the year 1825 a degree of Bachelor of Arts at Bow- 
doin, or for that matter at any other New England col- 
lege, represented a more meagre scholastic equipment 
than is now demanded of applicants for admission to the 
Freshman Class at Harvard, or than would have been 
tolerated at the earlier date in the fourth form of an 
English public school. Hawthorne's attainments, how- 
ever, at this stage of his career, were probably quite 
equal to those of Emerson or of Longfellow, and it was 
the duty of the biographer to inquire whether, in this 
case, the work of self -education had been pushed as 
strenuously and fruitfully as in theirs. If the subject of 
this memoir, during the dozen years of retirement that 
followed graduation, had compassed large acquisitions in 
history, in science, in philosophy, we have a right to 
expect that Mr. James should trace the direction and re- 
sults of this self-culture. If Hawthorne, on the other 
hand, remained content with a thin tincture of informa- 
tion touching some of the most important fields of in- 



Nathaniel Hawthorne. 267 

tellectual energy, these deficiencies should have been 
resolutely probed and boldly avowed. So, too, if the 
author of " The Marble Faun " really knew nothing, 
and cared nothing, for any art save that which finds ex- 
pression through the medium of written words, this was 
a strange anomaly which needed to be brought out with 
peculiar emphasis, and would have well repaid the most 
studious analysis. The writer's failure, however, to en- 
lighten us on these heads is far less disappointing than 
his reticence on another topic. No reader of the novelist 
needs to be told that the common theme of all Haw- 
thorne's stories is the deeper psychology — that they deal, 
one and all, with what homely folk are disposed to call 
the mysteries of man's soul and conscience. We say 
homely folk, because it is plain that the sphere of so- 
called mysteries is likely to be narrowed in proportion to 
the widening of man's metaphysical and physiological 
knowledge. In the case of works like Hawthorne's, it 
is surely of prime importance to learn precisely what the 
author's philosophy was ; what was his view of the rela- 
tion of man to the universe, of human character to cir- 
cumstances and congenital tendency ; of the relation of 
the intellect, the will, and the emotions to the cerebral 
substance in which they find their seat. How can we 
interpret such books as " The Scarlet Letter " or " The 
House of the Seven Gables," unless we have some 
such master key ? It was, we submit, the business of 
the biographer to seek the key, to expound Hawthorne's 
philosophy, if he had any, while, if after patient search 



268 Chats about Boohs. 

no trace of a reasoned, symmetrical, coherent system 
could be found ; if, in other words, Hawthorne, whose 
novels are popularly supposed to be nothing if not 
psychological, had no clear conceptions of psychology ; 
if he affected all the airs of a philosopher without pos- 
sessing the rudiments of a philosophy ; then it was in- 
cumbent on Mr. James, as a paramount obligation, to 
announce and elucidate this paradox. Certainly Haw- 
thorne's performance would not haye seemed to us less 
extraordinary or less creditable because the appliances 
should turn out to have been so rude and the materials 
so scanty. 

It is true that Mr. James does manage to leave the 
impression that Hawthorne had no science, no religion, 
no philosophy, and no art beyond his marvellous dexteri- 
ty in conjuring from words the effects of form and color. 
But there is nowhere any definite statement to that 
effect, not a sentence which enables the reader to indu- 
bitably fix the responsibility of his impression. We are 
sometimes prompted to surmise that Mr. James is un- 
willing to hurt the feelings of this or that relative of 
Hawthorne's by bringing out distinctly the humble origin 
and circumstances of the novelist, or by sounding the 
deficiencies of his intellectual outfit. Such a motive, 
we need not say, might very properly have led him to 
decline at the outset the task of writing a biography, 
but cannot be invoked to excuse a superficial execution 
of the work. Now and then, on the other hand, the 
turn of a sentence or the choice of an adjective suggests 



Nathaniel Hawthorne. 269 

that Mr. James may incline to disguise from an English 
audience the very modest, not to say shabby, surround- 
ings in which much of Hawthorne's life was passed, and 
the somewhat meagre acquirements of one whom we 
must acknowledge has left behind him a great name, 
although not the greatest, in our nascent literature. We 
discern in these pages, here and there, a disposition to 
force the note, to make things look a little brighter, a 
little bigger than they actually were. John Winthrop, 
for instance, is spoken of as a " Royal" Governor, 
whereas there was no such thing in Massachusetts Bay 
until after the Restoration. John Winthrop came out 
as the appointee and local delegate of a London com- 
pany of merchants and capitalists, and held office for 
about a year in that capacity, being subsequently re- 
elected by his fellow colonists. Again, we are told of a 
classmate of Hawthorne's, who is described as residing 
on his father's property in Maine, from which the artless 
English reader would scarcely infer that the young man 
in question was living on his father's farm. 

Though he nowhere distinctly says as much, appar- 
ently preferring, after the manner of Sainte-Beuve, to 
let others bear the burden of iconoclastic speech, Mr. 
James hints that Hawthorne was in no sense a thinker : 
that the single active and admirable element in his com- 
position was his imagination ; that he was purely and 
simply a maker, and that his makings took most fre- 
quently the unsubstantial form of frostwork and fili- 
gree. Indeed, the whole of Mr. James's book, so far as 



270 Chats about Boohs. 

it deals with criticism at all, is devoted to a series of 
prolonged and intricate variations on the constant theme 
of Hawthorne's " fancy." On this score the biographer 
is not disposed to stint his eulogy, and is at great pains 
to frame it in neat and corruscating sentences. The 
labor which Mr. James has here bestowed upon his 
diction is not unwise when we consider that the fre- 
quent citations from Hawthorne would naturally suggest 
a comparison of styles. It may be well for the biogra- 
pher if the comparison goes no further. Meanwhile we 
would point out one or two blemishes in the technical 
execution of this carefully chiselled work. "Why will 
Mr. James insist on enriching the English language 
with the Gallicism, "one would say," "one would 
think, "'and so forth ? Is the phrase essential to a per- 
fect simulation of Sainte-Beuve's manner, or does the 
writer think the prose of Addison, Sterne, and Gold- 
smith suffered for the want of it ? Why, again, must Mr. 
James repeat an adjective twenty times because it struck 
his ear as fresh and pictorial on its first application ? In 
some men such a repetition would be construed to mean 
sterility, and when Hawthorne is guilty of a like trans- 
gression Mr. James is quite severe, almost peremptory, 
with him. He animadverts on his subject's "extreme 
predilection for a small number of vague ideas, which 
are represented by such terms as ' sphere ' and ' sympa- 
thies ' ; " and he calls the too liberal use of these two 
substantives the " solitary defect of his style." No sin of 
Hawthorne's in this way is at all comparable, however, 



Nathaniel Hawthorne. 271 

with the rank torture of the word " dusky " perpetrated 
in this Yolume. We first come upon it in a citation 
from Hawthorne himself, who speaks of a certain tradi- 
tion being invested with a dim and " dusky " grandeur. 
To Mr. James the epithet seems to have the charm of a 
new discovery, and he goes on fingering and mouthing 
it till it becomes the stalest and emptiest adjective 
in his vocabulary. First we hear something of " dusky 
hours/' not long afterward of i( dusky flowers," pres- 
ently of a " dusky conscience," on another page of 
the " dusky blight," anon of "rich duskiness of color ; " 
then we come ona" dusky preoccupation," followed by 
a " dusky gaze," to which is subsequently appended a 
" dusky envelope," and then the same adjective in the 
superlative, "duskiest flowers." Of this epithet we 
might say what Mr. James affirms of Hawthorne, that it 
is vague, unanalytic, indefinable, ineffable. In this 
case, as in some instances noted by the biographer, 
vagueness is no doubt a drawback, for it is difficult to 
point to ethereal beauties ; and if the reader shall 
inform us, after looking a while at the word " dusky," 
that he perceives nothing in particular, we can only 
reply, in the words of Mr. James, that in effect the 
object is a crepuscular one. 



WILLIAM MOPPIS'S EPIC POEM. 

The school of poetry which budded a quarter of a 
century ago in a little London magazine called The 
Germ, and which, in the hands of Swinburne, Morris, 
and the Rossettis, has gained not a little reputation, 
seems to have culminated in the new epic poem by the 
author of "Jason," and "The Earthly Paradise." We 
would direct careful attention to this work, the Story of 
Sigurd the Yolsung and the Fall of the Niblungs, both 
because the sensuous, Pre-Raphaelitic treatment with 
which readers of recent poetry are familiar, has here 
found admirable expression, and because the theme is 
one of the fullest and highest with which a poet of our 
race could deal. 

What is this story, which now for the first time is fit- 
tingly told in the English tongue ? The tale of Sigurd, 
as Morris reminded us in a preliminary essay published 
some six years ago — a translation of the "Volsunga 
Saga " — is the great story of the North, which should be 
to all our race what the tale of Troy was to the Greeks 
— to all our race first, and afterward, when the change 
of the world has made our race nothing more than a 
name of what has been — a story too — then should it be 
to those that come after us no less than the tale of Troy 

has been to us. We cannot but think it a notable coin- 

272 



William Morris's Epic Poem. 273 

cidence that this legend, or rather cycle of heroic myths, 
after having well nigh faded from the memory of the 
Teutonic folk since the idiom of the Mbelungen Lied 
ceased to be readily intelligible, should all at once, and 
almost in the same year, have found two such interpret- 
ers as Richard Wagner and William Morris. 

The reader may find it interesting to contrast the 
various treatment which the tale of Sigurd, the Volsung, 
has received from the Minnesinger who composed the 
core of that retouched and recast work which is known 
to us as the Nibelungen Lied — in the dramatic form of 
Wagner's tetralogy, and finally in this English epic. 
For that purpose it may be well to condense from the 
Volsunga Saga and the prose Edda the cardinal features 
of the original story. 

The three gods, Odin, Loki, and Honir, in their 

wandering through the world come to a waterfall, 

whereby sits an otter devouring a fish which he has 

caught. Loki kills him with a stone and strips off his 

hide. At nightfall they seek shelter with a farmer, 

Hreidmar by name, and show him the otter's skin. 

LIreidmar calls his sons, Fafnir and Eegin, and tells 

them that their brother Otter has been slain, whereupon 

they seize the gods and bind them. For blood-money 

the father requires them to fill the skin with gold and 

cover it with the same metal. Loki is dispatched to seek 

the ransom, and captures in the water the dwarf Andvari 

(wearing the form of a fish) whom he compels to buy 

his freedom with his treasures. One ring, which would 
12* 



274 Chats about Boohs. 

have enabled him to duplicate the gold (Wagner's "Ring 
of the Nibelungen "), the dwarf would fain keep back ; 
and when Loki takes this also, pronounces a curse upon 
the hoard. Loki returns and ransoms the gods, but 
Hreidmar remarks that one hair of the otter's skin re- 
mains uncovered, and, at his demand, the ring is added, 
and with it passes the curse which rests upon the pos- 
sessor of the treasure. The surviving brothers claim a 
share of the gold, and when their father refuses to give 
it them they kill him. Fafnir, however, seizes the 
whole, and taking the form of a serpent, guards the 
hoard. Eegin, become a fugitive, tempts Sigurd, the 
son of Sigmund, to avenge him, and forges for him, from 
the fragments of his father's weapon, a sword so well 
tempered and sharp that it cleaves an anvil to the ground, 
and held in a running stream sunders a flock of wool 
which floats against it. Sigurd goes to Fafnir's abode, 
digs a pit in the snake's path, and from this ambush 
thrusts his sword through the reptile. Eegin cuts out 
his brother's heart, and bids Sigurd cook it for him. 
The latter, wishing to see if the heart is roasted, thrusts 
his finger in the fat, and then puts it in his mouth, 
whereupon he understands the language of the birds, 
and learns that Eegin is plotting treachery against him. 
The young man slays Eegin, and becoming the owner 
of the fatal hoard, carries it away on his horse Grani. 
He comes presently to a house on a mountain, and finds 
there a sleeping warrior clad in complete armor, whom, 
after taking off the helm, he discovers to be a woman. 



William Morris's Epic Poem. 275 

This is Brynhild, one of Odin's victory-messengers, 
whom the god had plunged in sleep because in a certain 
contest she had apportioned victory against his will. 
The two plight troth to one another, and Brynhild 
teaches Sigurd runes. Afterward the latter comes to 
the home of Giuki, a king dwelling by the Khine, with 
whose sons, Gunnar, Hogni, and Gufchorm, he strikes a 
league of friendship and takes part in their wars. The 
daughter of Giuki, Gudrun, to whom dreams haye fore- 
told misfortune, by the advice of her mother offers 
Sigurd a love potion, which causes him to forget Bryn- 
hild and to wed Gudrun. Gunnar meanwhile is minded 
to marry Brynhild, the sister of Atli, Budli's son, and 
Sigurd attends him in his wooing. But Brynhild's 
castle is encircled by a wall of flames, and only he who 
forces a passage through them may have her to wife. 
Gunnar essays it, but his horse starts aside ; and only 
when Sigurd, who has changed form with his friend, 
mounts his own horse, Grani, will the latter consent to 
cross the fire. Sigurd passes the night with Brynhild, 
but his sword lies between them on the couch. In the 
morning they exchange rings, Sigurd giving her that of 
the dwarf, Andvari. Thereupon he leaves the castle, 
resumes his own form, and Gunnar carries Brynhild 
home as his wife. 

By and by it happens that Brynhild and Gudrun are 
washing their hair in the Ehine, and the former goes 
up stream that the water running from Gudrun's locks 
may not touch her head, seeing she has wedded the better 



276 Chats about Books. 

man. They fall to wrangling about the comparative 
worth of their husbands, and Gudrun discloses how Si- 
gurd had ridden through the flames on behalf of Gunnar, 
and exchanged rings with the latter's bride. Brynhild 
goes home in silence, and for seven days lies without 
sleep or food, brooding upon her wrong. She urges 
Gudrun's brothers to slay Sigurd, and they stir up 
Guthorm to the deed. The latter steals to the guest's 
chamber, but when Sigurd turns on him his gleaming 
eyes he flies. A second attempt is alike fruitless, but 
the third time Sigurd is asleep, and his assailant runs 
him through. Sigurd, springing up, flings his sword 
after his flying enemy and cuts him in twain. When 
Gudrun wakes she finds her husband swimming in blood, 
and Brynhild laughs to hear her rival's outcry. Gudrun 
sits tearless by Sigurd's body until, one of her sisters 
drawing the face-cloth from the face, she kisses him and 
weeps. Meanwhile Brynhild stabs herself and is burned 
on the same pile with Sigurd. Gunnar and Hogni share 
the treasure, and Gudrun is subsequently married to 
Atli, King of Hunland, Brynhild's brother. The latter 
bids Gunnar and Hogni to a feast, but before leaving 
home they bury the so-called hoard of the Nibelungen 
in the Ehine, whence it was destined never to be recov- 
ered. Gudrun attempts to warn her brothers by a mes- 
sage written in runes, but neither this nor the ominous 
dreams of their own wives avail to deter them. Landing 
from their ships they ride to Atli's castle, where they are 
met by an army and the demand for Sigurd's treasure, 



William Morris's Epic Poem. 277 

which, is claimed for Gudrun. They refuse, and a fierce 
battle follows. All the men on their side having fallen, 
the two brothers are taken and bound, but Atli offers 
Gunnar his life if he will reveal where the treasure lies. 
But Gunnar will tell nothing before they show him his 
brother Hogni's heart. To deceive him, they cut the 
heart out of a slave and bring it him ; but, by its 
quivering, Gunnar recognizes that it is not the heart of 
Hogni. At last Atli bids them cut out Hogni's heart ; 
and when Gunnar sees this, he says that now no man 
save he alone knows where the treasure is, and none 
shall find it. Thereat Atli orders him to be flung into 
a pit filled with serpents ; but a harp is given him, which 
he plays with his toes (since his hands are tied), and so 
tunefully that all the snakes are lulled, except an adder, 
which stings him to death. The King of Hunland com- 
mands a funeral feast to be made for Gudrun's brothers ; 
but the Queen kills her children by Atli, and of their 
skulls fashions drinking cups, in which she serves the 
King mead mixed with blood. The same night she kills 
him, sets fire to the castle, and leaps into the sea. On 
Gudrun's after fate we need not dwell, since both the 
lay of the Mbelungen and Morris's poem find here a 
common acme. 

Such are the outlines of this famous legend, reflecting 
in a dim, uncertain fashion the religion, ethics, arts, and 
history of the primitive Teutonic stock. It seems to us 
not a little remarkable that of the three attempts to 
present this story in epic or dramatic form, the oldest 



278 Chats about Boohs. 

should have diverged most widely from the frame and 
spirit of the early myth. The medieval version, whose 
origin is placed not later than the first half of the 
twelfth century, but which received a remodelling of 
rhythm and the addition of rhyme in the time of the Ho- 
henstaufens, is loaded with anachronisms, the incidents, 
sentiments and persons of the tale being portrayed from 
the standpoint of a Christian and feudal knight. The 
result is that the Lay of the Nibelungen, in spite of the 
beauty of detached passages and the singular vehemence 
of the narrative in the latter portion, is utterly wanting 
in congruity, correlation, and univocal tone, and portrays 
a world that never was, or could be, on sea or land ; in a 
word, the poem could neither have been understood in 
Iceland before the introduction of Christianity, nor at 
the Court of Barbarossa by those unacquainted with 
the Norse sagas. For example, the relations of "Brun- 
hilde" and "Siegfried," as exhibited in the "Lay," 
would be quite unintelligible without some knowledge of 
the prose Edda, and the fateful significance of the treas- 
ure, the coveted " hoard of the Mbelungen " is nowhere 
plainly indicated. In general, the characters of the 
story, which in the genuine myth are massive, raw, half- 
demoniac figures, are softened and embellished almost 
beyond recognition. The reader of the Mbelungen Lied 
is continually reminded that the twelfth century, which 
in the north of France and England was undoubtedly a 
bleak, dark epoch, had its oases of civilization, and that 
Southern Germany, particularly the banks of the upper 



William Morris's Epic Poem. 279 

Danube, shared in no small degree the refinement of 
Provence and Northern Italy. Yet although the audi- 
ence which the Minnesinger addressed was very far re- 
moved in feeling from that which called forth the 
Volsunga Saga, it was perhaps equally distant from that 
nice perception of artistic aims and methods which be- 
longs to the most enlightened eras. It was reserved for 
poets of our own day to divest their versions of anything 
like patent anachronism or incongruity, and to repro- 
duce with creditable fidelity in its native hues and dis- 
tinctive atmosphere the great story of the North. 

"With the merits of Wagner, as a composer of operas, 
we have at present, of course, no concern ; but it seems 
to us that the purely literary worth of the dramatic 
poems which he has grouped together, under the general 
title of the " Ring of the Nibelungen," has not in this 
country and England, at least, been rightfully appreci- 
ated. His tetralogy is in no sense a recasting of the 
Nibelungen Lied. Aside from the distinction of artis- 
tic form, the latter poem differs in respect of theme, 
spending its best force on the events which, in the old 
myth, followed the murder of Sigurd, in other words, 
on the Fall of the Niblungs, whereas "Wagner confines 
himself to the earlier incidents, and ends with the self- 
slaying of Brynhiid. Neither is comparison between 
the versions possible as regards scrupulous adherence to 
the texture, feeling, and purpose of the original. It is 
true that in the second of his dramas, "Die Walkiire," 
Wagner departs somewhat from the letter of the legend, 



280 Chats about Boohs. 

making " Siegfried" the son of " Siegmund " and " Sieg- 
linde," whereas, in the Saga, Sigurd is the son of Hjor- 
dis, while Sinf jotli, who has a story of his own, is the 
son of Sigmund and Signy. Yet, here he follows the 
Lay of the Nibelungen, and it was perhaps inseparable 
from the aim of a dramatist to compress the whole life 
of Signrund, which claims much space in the Saga, 
within the scope of a single tragedy. It is certain that 
the characters of the ill-fated Volsunga pair are pro- 
jected with wonderful distinctness, yet closely within the 
outlines of the ancient myth, and that the scenes be- 
tween " Siegmund" and " Sieglinde" are among the 
most winning and effective in the whole work. Be that 
as it may, in the figures of Sigurd and Brynhild and the 
record of their fortunes as shown to us in the last two 
dramas, "Siegfried" and "Gotteixlammerung," we 
catch the very spirit of the Edda, while notwithstand- 
ing the limitations entailed by a dramatic form, not a 
single feature of prime importance seems to be over- 
looked on Wagner's canvas. In respect, moreover, of 
essential beauty, apart from their fidelity and dexterity 
in interpretation, these dramas are singularly affluent, 
and we should find it hard, for instance, to parallel in 
the work of any recent poet the exquisite tenderness and 
profound passion which gleam and throb through the 
dialogue allotted to " Siegfried " and "Briinhilde" at 
the close of the third play, or the remorseful agony 
which shivers through the death-song of "Brunhilde" 
in the last scene of the concluding drama. There is 



William Morris's Epic Poem. 281 

another point worth notice, and that is the moral atmos- 
phere which bathes these poems, and which to those 
unfamiliar with old Norse literature may appear in- 
appropriate, but it will be convenient to glance at this 
in connection with Morris's treatment of the same 
theme. 

It was inevitable that the Pre-Raphaelitic poets would 
turn at last from Greek myths to the Norse Sagas, and 
it will probably be conceded that Morris had giyen full- 
est proof of the sustained power requisite for handling 
such large materials. Whether, however, the character- 
istic standpoint and manner of the school was calcu- 
lated to insure a faithful transcript of the Icelandic epic 
might have been held open to question. For what is 
the burden of their song ? That the absence of pleas- 
ure and of poetry in the routine of our daily work, the 
spreading of the hideous town, the prosaic outward fur- 
niture of modern life are become a grievance and a re- 
proach. Yet if something more sightly is no longer to 
b.e found in the actual world without, we have still the 
power of creating some shadow of it with the aid of 
imagination. The world must have had a childhood 
once and the endeavor of the Pre-Raphaelites is to bring 
back again the golden age — the days of the infancy of 
the race. They seem to embody most distinctly the 
ideal of childhood in its two main features, vivid enjoy- 
ment of the pleasures of sense, and freedom from moral 
responsibility. A state of enjoyment where the out- 
ward delights of mere sensation are felt with a keenness 



282 Chats about Books. 

-which is unknown to us now, but yet — and here rises 
the doubt as to the entire fitness of such writers to treat 
such themes as the Edda — coupled with a certain esoteric 
refinement of artistic sentiment is the picture they are 
constantly drawing of the past. Whether Morris de- 
scribes the course of the ship " Argo," or follows Norwe- 
gian mariners into the unknown West, or recites the 
tales which charmed the dwellers in an " Earthly Para- 
dise," wherever the scenes of his ideal life are cast, they 
all belong to the world's childhood, but a childhood 
which cannot wholly free itself from the memories of 
age, to a dreamland which is haunted with a conscious- 
ness that it is but a dream. Now the tone of feeling 
which this sort of work engenders, and which may be 
called a self-contemplative sensuousness, is a quite dif- 
ferent thing from sensuality, yet it is likewise wholly 
distinct from a sensuousness which is not introspective, 
from the power of enjoyment which belongs to child- 
hood, to the infancy of mankind more than its maturer 
age, to some races and some nations more than others, 
and which seems to have been the peculiar birthright 
of those Norse heroes who held themselves to be sons of 
Odin. It might therefore have been expected that 
the trace of self-consciousness which flickers across the 
open-eyed delight of Jason's Hellenic comrades would 
appear even more incongruous in the persons of Icelandic 
story, yet we are bound to say, that, as a matter of fact, 
the blemish — if blemish it be— is less noticeable in the 
present work. This is partly due, we imagine, to the 



William Morris's Epic Poem. 283 

closeness, almost literalness, with which Morris has fol- 
lowed the metrical fragments which are left to us of the 
poetic Edda as well as the text of the prose versions. 
In the circumstances it is not likely that any will cavil 
at such direct reproduction, seeing that the numerous 
gaps and slurs in the primitive record leave ample room 
for expansion and elaboration. These acknowledg- 
ments made, it is still true that the new epic is not 
wholly free from that tinge of introversion and self-pity 
which hovers like a faint cloud over the horizon of all 
Morris's work, and in th is respect we think that Wag- 
ner has compassed more nearly the right atmosphere, 
the figures of his Volsungs standing forth crisp and 
bold in a clear, cool radiance like that of their own 
northern summer night. 

One word as to the metrical form which Morris has 
adopted, and then we will try to offer the reader a 
glimpse of Sigurd's story in the new version. The 
" Lay of the Nibelungen," as we now have it, is written 
in rhymed iambic quatrains, each line having six or six 
and a half feet with a strongly marked, invariable caesura 
in the middle of each verse. Morris's epic is not unlike 
this in effect, for although the scheme of the verse is 
anapaestic the number of feet in a line is the same, and 
the caesura occupies a corresponding place. The simi- 
larity will be plain enough upon comparison of a distich 
from each poem : 

Do wuohs in Niderlanden — eins edlen kuneges kint 
Des vater der hiez Siegemunt — sin muoter Sigelint, 



284 Chats about Boohs. 

But Sigmund laughed and answered— and he spake a scornful word 
"And if I take twice that treasure — will it buy me Odin's sword ? " 

From the extracts which we may make the reader will 
probably infer that the measure which Morris has here 
chosen is capable of great yariety and melody. 

The poem opens with a description of King Volsung's 
dwelling and the wedding of his daughter Signy — we re- 
peat that Morris covers the whole ground divided be- 
tween the mediseval "Lay" and Wagner's tetralogy. 
We quote half a dozen of the initial couplets in order to 
illustrate the rhythm and music of the verse, and we 
might also point out the characteristic touch in the last 
lines : 

There was a dwelling of kings ere the world was waxen old ; 
Dukes were the door- wards there, and the roofs were thatched with 

gold; 
Earls were the wrights that wrought it, and silver nailed its doors ; 
Earls' wives were the weaving women, queens' daughters strewed 

its floors, 
And the masters of its song-craft were the mightiest men that cast 
The sails of the storm of battle adown the bickering blast. 
There dwelt men merry-hearted, and in hope exceeding great 
Met the good days and the evil as they went the way of fate ; 
There the gods were unf orgotten, yea whiles they walked with men 
Though e'en in that world's beginning rose a murmur now and 

again 
Of the midward time and the fading and the last of the latter days, 
And the entering in of the terror and the death of the People's 

Praise. 

That the reader may judge how carefully the text of 



William Morris's Epic Poem. 285 

the old myth is reproduced, we set beside the words as- 
cribed to Signy in the crisis of what may be called the 
first catastrophe, the corresponding passage of the 
" Volsunga Saga." 

And she said, "My youth was happy, but this hour belike is best 

Of all the days of my life-tide that soon shall have an end, 

I have come to greet thee, Sigmund, then back again must I wend, 

For his bed the Goth-king dighteth ; I have lain therein, time was, 

And loathed the sleep I won there : but lo, how all things pass, 

And hearts are changed and softened, for lovely now it seems. 

Yet fear not my forgetting ; I shall see thee in my dreams 

A mighty king of the world 'neath the boughs of the Branstock 

green, 
With thine earls and thy lords about thee, as the Volsung fashion 

hath been ; 
And then shall all ye remember how I loved the Volsung name, 
Nor spared, to spend for its blooming, my joy and my life and my 

fame. 
For hear thou, that Sinfiotli, who hath wrought out our desire, 
Who hath compassed about King Siggeir with his sea of a deadly 

fire, 
Who brake thy grave asunder— my child and thine he is, 
Begot in that house of the Dwarf -kind for no other end than this. 
The son of Volsung's daughter, the son of Volsung's son, 
Look, look ! Might another helper this deed with thee have done ? 

The Icelandic prose paraphrase runs as follows : 

But she answered, "Take heed now and consider if I have kept 
King Siggeir in memory and his slaying of Volsung the king. I 
let slay both my children whom I deemed worthless for the reveng- 
ing of our father, and I went into the wood to thee in a witch- 
wife's shape ; and now behold Sinfiotli is the son of thee and of me 



286 Chats about Boohs. 

both ! and therefore has he this so great hardihood and fierceness 
in that he is the son both of Volsung's and Volsung's daughter ; 
and for this and for naught else have I so wrought that King Sig- 
geir might get his bane at last ; and all these things have I done 
that vengeance might fall on him, and that I too might not live 
long, and merrily now will I die with King Siggeir though I was 
naught merry to wed him. 

We would gladly quote at greater length (although an 
epic poem cannot of course be judged from citations), 
and especially should we like to reproduce the forging 
of the sword, Fafnir's bane, the slaying of Fafnir, the 
awakening of Brynhild, and all those scenes and inci- 
dents which are handled in "Wagner's dramas/ It would 
be interesting, too, to trace in the fourth book of the 
English poem a parallel with the latter and stronger half 
of the Nibelungen Lied. That, however, would carry 
us too far, and the reader has perhaps already seen rea- 
son to believe that the appearance of this latest, ripest, 
and most ambitious of Morris's works is indeed no ordi- 
nary event, and that this new version of the great legend 
of the North is one of the most signal contributions to 
English poetry since the writing of Childe Harold. 



BRET HARTE. 

It used to be noted thirty years ago by those who 
knew Europe well that the only American author whose 
works had been transplanted into all the literary lan- 
guages, and whose name had struck firm root in foreign 
soils, was James Fenimore Cooper. You found his novels 
everywhere, as you found Scott's — in Lisbon, Seville, and 
Palermo, and Prague and Moscow, Stockholm and Copen- 
hagen — not only crowned with popular favor, but studied 
and discussed by accomplished and inquisitive intellects, 
who apparently had never heard of those transatlantic 
coteries which affected to make light of the Leather- 
stocking Tales. Marking this phenomenon, the young 
Bostonian of that day was led to reconsider some of his 
second-hand opinions, and to query whether such cos- 
mopolitan esteem could be gained without substantial 
merit. Here, at all events, was a great fact, and he was 
not unlikely to infer from it that the judgment of other 
countries anticipates the verdict of the future : that 
foreign nations are banks of discount competent to cash 
the drafts which an artist draws upon posterity. 

Cooper's is no longer the only American name familiar 
to cultivated men and women throughout Europe. Dur- 
ing recent years the reputation of Bret Harte has grown 

with signal rapidity, not only in France and Germany, 

287 



288 Chats about Boohs. 

but in the Latin countries of the South, less prompt to 
gauge aright the worth of an English book, and even in 
those capitals of the North, centres of Slavic and Scandi- 
navian activity, which seem to have least in common 
with the American novelist. Of this fact periodical 
literature and the book lists of foreign publishers afford 
sufficient proof. Eeviews or translations of Mr. Harte' s 
tales have appeared in critical journals and magazines 
printed at Lisbon and Madrid ; the specific qualities of 
his work have been more than once examined by that 
arbiter of Italian opinion, the "Rivista Europea " Sacher- 
Masoch, the Galician novelist, who delights to be called 
an imitator of Bret Harte, has filled the Vienna press 
with j)raises of his model, while the name and many of 
the stories- of the American artist are familiar to the 
readers of the "Moscow Gazette," who, it is safe to say, 
include all cultivated Russians. Other facts not less 
pertinent, but more notorious, might be cited, such as 
the large amount of space given to translations from 
Bret Harte in the pages of the " Revue des deux Mondes," 
whose clientele, we need not remind the reader, embraces 
the elite of Continental society. We might point also 
to the circumstance that one of the author's tales was 
secured for simultaneous publication by the " Deutsche 
Rundschau," which aims to maintain at Berlin a position 
analogous to that of M. Buloz's famous Parisian peri- 
odical. Now, these are facts whose large significance 
requires no interpreter ; they attest a breadth and 
solidity of reputation which it would be absurd to claim 



Bret ffarte. 289 

for any other contemporary American ; they prove that 
this man's genius needs the stamp of no clique or coterie 
to pass current everywhere ; they certify that his draft 
upon posterity has been honored ; that his achievement 
has passed into history. 

We are reminded of these things by the appearance of 
a new volume, " The Story of a Mine." Such considera- 
tions as we have above referred to greatly simplify the 
work of a reviewer, for he knows that in this instance 
the world has made up its mind, and that nothing he 
can say is likely to affect its verdict. They are apt, 
moreover, to modify his attitude, smoothing the rugged 
independence of anonymous criticism to a deference 
which is but due to a bright and established name. 
Good wine, of course, needs no bush, and all that the 
reading public seeks to learn of its book in such cases is 
whether the particular flask is of the proprietor's best 
vintage. It is certain that this "Story of a Mine" 
exhibits some of the most careful and delicate work that 
has come from the author's hand. Few men have a 
happier faculty of drawing lifelike and charming women, 
yet there is in this volume a study of a Spanish-Cali- 
fornian young lady, Miss Carmen De Haro, which is 
singularly captivating. All the masculine figures — and 
a much larger number than is usual with the writer are 
grouped upon the canvas — have the crisp, sharp out- 
lines and the semblance of vitality which lead the 
uninitiated, who overlook the toil and insight applied 

in selection and projection, to mistake Bret Hart's por- 
13' 



290 Chats about Boohs. 

traits for photographs from real life. But no one ever 
saw, or if he saw, understood, the originals of these 
characters. It was reserved for the artist to diyine and 
reveal in a stroke or two the shape and color of a mind 
and life ; and these are powers, we need not say, which 
transcend the capabilities of the ordinary observer. The 
power of portraiture, exercised under the right dramatic 
conditions of self-betrayal through colloquy and inci- 
dent, is not, as some simple-minded students of Bret 
Harte imagine, to be confounded with a lively faculty 
of reminiscence which enables an eye-witness to repro- 
duce a scene. It would be ludicrous, if it did not bring 
home to us an inveterate vice of human nature, the 
detraction which inevitably dogs the footsteps of suc- 
cess, to see Bret Harte's reputation explained, as we 
sometimes do see it on the part of petulant or discon- 
tented persons, by a happy accident, a lucky hit, as if 
any magazine writer or newspaper reporter who had 
chanced to see a Chinaman playing cards, or had spent 
a week in a mining camp could have worked up the 
novel materials to the same large results. We will not 
ask those gentlemen who conceive that Bret Harte's 
success should be credited to his opportunity to com- 
pute how many Agamemnons may have existed before 
Homer, but we will merely remind them that some 
three and a half centuries had elapsed since the afflux 
of adventurers to the mines of Peru and Mexico created 
conditions substantially identical with those of " Soar- 
ing Camp " and " Poker Flat," while the mining life of 



Bret Harte. 291 

California was, at a later period, duplicated in Aus- 
tralia; yet neither before nor since, nor by any other 
writer in any language, have the characteristic stamp 
and flavor of a gold hunter's existence, and the strange 
traits of a community smitten through and through 
with the gold fever, been truthfully, effectively, and 
delightfully reproduced. 

After all deductions have been made on the score of a 
peculiarly fresh and fruitful theme, it is plain that the 
author of the " Condensed Novels " would have made his 
opportunity, if he had not found it. Neither is it in 
accordance with the facts to speak of this man's talent 
as limited by local conditions — as the specific product of 
a particular soil. It may no doubt be satisfactory to 
certain minds to thus identify an artist's performance 
with his circumstances, for the theory seems to carry the 
implication that they, too, might have done something 
creditable in a like stimulating environment. But the 
truth is that genius is a hardy and hungry plant, toler- 
ably certain to find sustenance anywhere. Those who 
are thoroughly acquainted with the writings of this 
novelist know how broad and diverse is the field covered 
by his scrutiny. Even in that feverish world which lies 
between the Sierras and the Golden Gate, there is a mul- 
titude of types, there are innumerable phases of social 
life, all the elements of a microcosm, indeed, whose 
study might well qualify an interpreter of the human 
comedy. We expect to find, and we do find, the same 
penetration and the same faculty of artistic exposition 



292 Chats about Books. 

when the author passes from a sketch of "Mrs. Skagg's 
husbands," to a transcript of contemporary society in 
some relatively old Atlantic city, or to an historical pict- 
ure of village and army life in the Jerseys at the epoch 
of the Kevolution. Thus in one of Bret Harte's tales we 
are transported from a decayed mining town, which we 
take to be Placerville, to Newport, and assuredly there 
is a considerable difference between the social atmos- 
phere of those pleasant and somewhat stately houses 
which fringe the Cliff, and the manners of Poker Plat : 
yet the author's page is as faithful and suggestive, if 
not as startling, in the one case as the other. So, too, 
in the book before us the scenes and the persons proper 
to a Mexican village on the Calif ornian coast in the early 
years of American occupation, are not a whit more truth- 
fully and skilfully described than is the city of Washing- 
ton as we know it to-day. By way of demonstration we 
need only place a couple of paragraphs side by side. 
Let us take, for instance, a few lines which paint a canon 
in the Coast Range, where a deposit of cinnabar is dis- 
covered : 

The scene was weird enough without Wiles's eye to add to its 
wild picturesqueness. The mountain towered above — a heavy Rem- 
brandtish mass of black shadow — sharply cut here and there against 
a sky so inconceivably remote that the world-sick soul must have 
despaired of ever reaching so far or of climbing its steel-blue walls. 
The stars were large, keen, and brilliant, but cold and steadfast. 
They did not dance nor twinkle in their adamantine setting. The 
furnace fire painted the faces of the men an Indian red, glanced 
on brightly-colored blanket and serape, but was eventually caught 



Bret Harte. 293 

and absorbed in the waiting shadows of the black mountain, 
scarcely twenty feet from the furnace door. The low, half-sung, 
half- whispered foreign speech of the group, the roaring of the fur- 
nace, and the quick, sharp yelp of a coyote on the plain below 
were the only sounds that broke the awful silence of the hills. 

Now we may turn to the record of the impression 
left upon the mind by an August day in the national 
capital. 

It was a midsummer's day in Washington. Even at early morn- 
ing, while the sun was yet level with the faces of pedestrians in its 
broad, shadeless avenues, it was insufferably hot. Later, the ave- 
nues themselves shone like the diverging rays of another sun — 
the Capitol — a thing to be feared by the naked eye. Later yet 
it grew hotter, and then a mist arose from the Potomac, and 
blotted. out the blazing arch above, and presently piled up along 
the horizon delusive thunder clouds that spent their strength and 
substance elsewhere, and left it hotter than before. Towards 
evening the sun came out invigorated, having cleared the heavenly 
brow of perspiration, but leaving its fever unabated. 

And here is a type which will be easily recognized — • 
the average American legislator : 

In this capital, on this languid midsummer day, in an upper room 
of one of its second-rate hotels, the Hon. Pratt C. Gashwiler sat 
at his writing-table. There are certain large, fleshy men with whom 
the omission of even a necktie or collar has all the effect of an in- 
decent exposure. The Hon. Mr. Gashwiler, in his trousers and 
shirt was a sight to be avoided by the modest eye. There were 
such palpable suggestions of vast extents of unctuous flesh in the 
slight glimpse offered by his open throat, that his dishabille should 
have been as private as his business. Nevertheless, when there 
was a knock at his door, he unhesitatingly said, "Come in!" 



294 Chats about Boohs. 

pushing away a goblet crowned with a certain aromatic herb with 
his right hand, while he drew towards him with his left a few 
proof slips of his forthcoming speech. The Gashwiler brow be- 
came, as it were, intelligently abstracted. 

"You are at work, I see," the intruder said, apologetically. 

"Yes," replied the Congressman, with an air of perfunctory 

weariness — "one of my speeches. Those d d printers make 

such a mess of it. I suppose I don't write a very fine hand." 

If the gifted Gashwiler had added that he did not write a very 
intelligent hand, or a very grammatical hand, and that his spell- 
ing was faulty, he would have been truthful, although the copy 
and proof before him might not have borne him out. The near 
fact was that the speech was composed and written by one Ex- 
pectant Dobbs, a poor retainer of Gashwiler, and the honorable 
member's labor as a proof-reader was confined to the introduction 
of such words as "anarchy," "oligarchy," "satrap," "palla- 
dium," and "Argus-eyed" in the proof, with little relevancy as 
to position or place, and no perceptible effect as to argument. 

Now this etching is obviously more faithful, while it 
is not less biting, than Dickens's sketch of our indige- 
nous politician in "American Notes." Nor could we 
better signalize the thoroughly impartial, and, so to 
speak, impersonal attitude which distinguishes the artist 
from the satirist, than by contrasting with the Hon. Mr. 
Gashwiler a very different type of statesman, whose solid 
worth is clearly marked, although at the same time his 
foibles are touched with delicate irony. The reader 
will of course recognize the portrait of Senator Sumner, 
for in this instance — unique, so far as we know — the 
author has allowed himself to transfer, without adjust- 
ment or sublimation, the lineaments of life : 



Bret Harte. 295 

There was at this time in the Senate of the United States an 
eminent and respected gentleman, scholarly, orderly, honorable, 
and radical — the fit representative of a scholarly, orderly, honor- 
able, and radical commonwealth. For many years he had held his 
trust with conscious rectitude and a slight depreciation of other 
forms of merit ; and for as many years had been as regularly re- 
turned to his seat by his constituency with equal consciousness of 
rectitude in themselves and an equal scepticism regarding others. 
Removed by his nature beyond the reach of certain temptations, 
and by circumstances beyond even the knowledge of others, his 
social and political integrity was spotless. An orator and practical 
debater, his refined tastes kept him from personality, and the pub- 
lic recognition of the complete unselfishness of his motives, and the 
magnitude of his dogmas, protected him from scurrility. His 
principles had never been appealed to by a bribe ; he had rarely 
been approached by an emotion. 

We must find space for one more extract, namely, the 
inimitable interview between the New England Senator 
and an impulsive Mexican young lady, whose knowledge 
of our idioms is traceable to Calif ornian sources : 

" Ah," said Carmen, sadly, " it is true, then, all this that I have 
heard ? It is true — that what they have told me — that you have 
given up the great party — that your voice is not longer heard in the 
old — what you call this — eh — the old issues f " 

"If any one has told you that, Miss De Haro," responded the 
Senator, sharply, "he has spoken foolishly. You have been mis- 
informed. May I ask who " 

"Ah," said Carmen, "I know not ! It is in the air ! I am a 
stranger. Perhaps I am de-ceived. But it is of all. I say to them 
when shall I hear him speak ? I go day after day to the Capitol. 
I watch him, the great Emancipator, but it is of business, eh?— it 



296 Chats about Boohs. 

is the claim of that one, it is the tax, eh ?— it is the impost, it is 
the Post Office, but it is the great speech of human rights — never, 
never, I say. ' How arrives all this ? ' And some say and shake 
their heads, ' Never again he speaks. ' He is what you call ' played ' 
— yes, it is so, eh ?— ' played out.' I know it not ; it is a word 
from Bos-ton, perhaps ? ' They say he has— eh, I speak not the 
English well— the party he has shaken, ' shook ' — yes — he has the 
party ' shaken,' eh ? It is right — it is the language of Boston, eh ? " 

"Permit me to say, Miss De Haro," returned the Senator, rising 
with some asperity, "that you seem to have been unfortunate in 
your selection of acquaintances, and still more so in your ideas 
of the derivations of the English tongue. The-er-the-er-express- 
ions you have quoted are not common to Boston, but emanate, I 
believe, from the West." 

Carmen De Haro contritely buried everything but her black eyes 
in her shawl. 

It would be superfluous to enlarge at this late day on 
the intense sympathy with nature, and the luminous, 
unerring rendition of all her moods and aspects, which, 
except in the pages of William Black, Thomas Hardy, 
and of this writer, are so seldom found among living 
English novelists, coupled with any very profound or 
comprehensive knowledge of men. The author of 
" Gabriel Conroy " has the power of placing a land- 
scape before the eye, not only in its native tinge and 
outline, but bathed in congenial feeling ; and he is wont 
to suggest the dominant tone of the composition by 
deftly striking the key-note in one or two apt adjectives. 
It is perhaps reasonable to say, that as a prose painter of 
nature — were that his sole conspicuous merit — our 



Bret Harte. 297- 

American novelist would deserve to rank with Hardy 
and Black, who have in other respects much less con- 
siderable claims to special recognition. 

It is a significant fact, and one well calculated to im- 
press the observer with the breadth and diversity of 
Bret Harte's performances, that we hear very little 
about his landscape drawing from his foreign reviewers. 
They insist most, as is fitting, on the prime function of 
the novelist, the keen, exhaustive scrutiny of his fellow 
men, and the graduated, consistent, yet brisk and 
scintillant evolution of character under the impact of 
incident and the swift pulse of dialogue. They note, as 
we all do, that Bret Harte is not over circumspect or 
happy in the concatenation of plot ; but that is a matter 
about which English readers have not learned to be par- 
ticularly sedulous, since, if we except Fielding, and, in 
some of her books, George Eliot, no English novelist of 
the first rank has paid much attention to the skeleton of 
his composition. And after all, the superlative achieve- 
ment of narrative art is the creation of human beings 
challenging, by the right of a glowing personality, a 
place among those denizens of the world of fiction who 
are the immortal friends and comrades of our dreams. 

To communicate to his figures that infectious vitality 
toward which we warm with an instinctive sympathy 
and an intuitive apprehension of motive and temper is, 
of course, only given to an author whose mind vibrates 
to every semi-tone of human emotion, who is blessed, or 
afflicted, with that exquisite sensibility, which, 



-298 Chats about Books. 

"Like the needle true, 
Turns at the touch of joy or woe, 
And turning, trembles too." 

It is when to the artist's organization is added the 
power of translating and propagating the finer and more 
evanescent shades of feeling through the stiff medium of 
speech, that we haye the final product of genius — those 
consummate instruments of spiritual empire which we 
call humor and pathos. Now the sway which a given 
author exerts over the feelings is something to he certi- 
fied by experience, not tested by analysis ; and it is but 
justice to point out that by the consensus of quali- 
fied opinion, both at home and abroad, very few prose 
writers of our own, or of any recent generation, can vie 
with Bret Harte in the mastery of our smiles and tears. 
And certainly it is unreasonable to compare any Ameri- 
can novelist on the score of daintiness or hyper-refine- 
ment of diction, or anomalous capacity of morbid self- 
introspection, or nice exploration of some shallow phase 
of high society, with this spacious, teeming, fervid, 
laughter-rousing and sob-compelling intellect. Such a 
man, we may be sure, owes very little to accident. It 
was by virtue of their sovereign veracity in the broad 
lines of human nature, and by the electric quality which 
defies the barriers of speech and race, that his works 
passed the sea and found a domicile in so many European 
households. Now and then, in some Paris or Berlin 
coterie, you may meet with an eclectic, inquisitive person 
who has learned something about other American writers 



Bret Harte. 299 

of prose fictions, but it the simple truth that Bret Harte 
is known to every cultivated man in Europe, and not sel- 
dom his travelling countrymen have found in the delight- 
ful impression produced by our chief novelist a standing 
letter of credit and a sure passport to good will. 



EDWIN ARNOLDS LIGHT OF ASIA. 

Only recently has an account, at once authentic, ade- 
quate and popular, of Gautama, the teacher of a lofty 
and benignant gospel, which, at this day, counts among 
its yotaries more than a third of the earth's denizens, 
been accessible to English readers. Five years ago, Dr. 
Samuel Beal, Professor of Chinese in London University, 
published a succinct narrative of the Hindu evangelist's 
life, under the title of " The Eomantic History of Bud- 
dha." About the same time he was charged with the 
editing of the Buddhist canonical scriptures, which, em- 
bodied in a series of two thousand volumes, had been 
presented to England by the Japanese Government. He 
is said to be now preparing a compendious report upon 
the so-called Tripitaka, or triple basket of ethics, ritual, 
and philosophy. Happily we shall not need to await the 
fruit of his labors in order to dispel the incongruity ex- 
hibited in the eagerness of English-speaking peoples to 
convert the heathen while they remained profoundly ig- 
norant of all religions except their own, and especially 
of that great Aryan faith which presents so many close 
and curious parallels to Christianity. The function of 
eloquent, sympathetic interpretation, which scholars had 
too long neglected, has been undertaken by a poet, and 

the story of Buddha will at last be read by thousands, by 

300 



Edwin Arnold's Light of Asia. . 301 

whom a critical exposition might have been passed un- 
heeded. We refer, of course, to the remarkable epic 
poem called " The Light of Asia," written by Mr. Edwin 
Arnold, from the point of yiew of an Indian Buddhist. 

Why Mr. Arnold's earlier studies should have taken 
the direction of the Hindu philosophies, and of their 
consummate blossom in the Buddhist faith, is intelligi- 
ble enough when we are told that he spent some seven 
years in India as the president of a college at Poona. 
But it is surprising that a journalist, plunged in the 
most exacting and exhaustive of vocations, should have 
found time or will to continue his researches ; and our 
astonishment is heightened when we find the acquisitions 
of learning and industry not only fused and organized 
in lucid narrative, but that narrative embroidered with 
an artist's felicity, illumined with a poet's fancy, and 
cast in the rhythmic flow of delightful verse. A design 
of such scope and difficulty would tax the unexpended 
energies of an unburdened life, and grave shortcomings 
in execution might have been pardoned in a work to 
which an unleisured author gave, not all the strength it 
asked, but all he could command. There is no occasion, 
however, for such extrinsic considerations, or for apology 
of any kind in "The Light of Asia." Mr. Arnold has 
made an epic poem whose beauty is its own voucher, and 
whose lessons are commended with a sweetness such as 
Sidney contemplated when he likened a poet's winning 
ministrations to a medicine of cherries. How patiently 
and happily the large scheme has been compassed we 



302 Chats about Books. 

shall leave the reader to judge from a series of citations 
which, at the same time, illustrate the author's various 
powers, and exhibit in outline the capital stages of Gau- 
tama's life and ministry. We will merely premise that 
while the eighth and concluding book is essentially didac- 
tic, aiming to formulate the philosophic and ethical doc- 
trines of the Buddhist system, the first seven books are 
primarily and mainly narratives reciting with admirable 
freshness and simplicity the story of the hero prince who 
has given light and consolation to one-half of Asia. In all 
this part of his work the author means to discharge the 
function of the tale-weaver in the most straightforward 
and effective fashion, and therefore, although glimpses of 
fair, strange landscapes, transcripts of quaint, long-van- 
ished manners, bursts of lyric joy or tenderness, and even 
august musings or gentle homilies, are not wanting, 
these are only the episodes or accessories subordinate to 
the artistic conditions of a central epic purpose. We 
should find it hard to name another among contemporary 
singers who can at once acquit himself so deftly in short 
flights and yet remain so long upon the wing. It is very 
seldom that the power of facile self-surrender to transi- 
tory moods has been conjoined with an equal capacity of 
evolving a coherent, symmetrical, majestic performance. 
Mr. Arnold tells us in his preface that he has modified 
more than one passage in the received narratives, but he 
does not mention whether he prefers the authority of 
the Cingalese canon, fixed by the great council held un- 
der King Asoka about 246 B.C., and which occupies to 



Edwin Arnold's Light of Asia. 303 

Buddhism much such a relation as the Council of Nice 
to Christianity, or the somewhat fuller scriptures em- 
braced in the Thibetan or Chinese canon, determined in 
a council held in Cashmere about the beginning of the 
Christian era. Both of these collections, however, are 
said to substantially agree in the legends regarding the 
birth of Buddha, with which the poem opens. The 
parity of the extraordinary and miraculous circumstances 
which attended this event with those which preceded or 
followed Christ's nativity has often been remarked. 
Thus, Gautama was said to have already attained the 
perfection of being in the highest of the heavens ; never- 
theless, he was so moved by the wretched condition both 
of mankind and of all sentient creatures, that by the 
force of his exceeding love he once more took upon him 
the form of man, in order that he might save the world. 
He chose, too, as his earthly mother the wife of the King 
of Kapilavastu, named Maya, who was henceforth 
known as the "Holy Mother Maya." He was her first 
and only son, and he was immaculately conceived. In 
the Chinese account of his incarnation the description of 
the event is thus literally translated : " The Holy Ghost 
descended into the womb." We are told further that on 
the day of the child's birth the heavens shone with di- 
vine light, and the earth quivered while angelic hosts 
sang : " To-day Buddha is born on earth to give joy and 
peace, to give light to those in darkness, and sight to the 
eyes of the blind." Again, merchants from far coun- 
tries bring gifts to the newly born, and the incident re- 



304 Chats about Books. 

lated of Simeon by Luke coincides with a tradition of an 
aged hermit of the Himalayas, who, being divinely 
guided to the spot where the young child lay in the arms 
of Maya, his mother, placed his venerable head under 
the tiny feet of the infant, and spoke of him as the *.* De- 
liverer from sin, and sorrow, and death ." 

Even the jealous apprehensions of Herod find an 
analogy in the reference to a neighboring king of 
Maghadha, who was advised to send an army to destroy 
the child that would become a universal monarch. 
Finally, we learn that the child (called Gautama, from 
his foster mother) astonished his teachers when he en- 
tered the schools of letters and of arms, so that they said, 
" Surely, this is the instructor of gods and men who 
condescends to seek for a master." As regards the date 
of these legends, it is impossible to say just when this or 
that myth originated. We only know that all must have 
arisen during the five centuries which elapsed between 
Buddha's death, fixed by the, most trustworthy data at 
about 543 B.C., and the formation of the Northern canon 
at the beginning of our era. It is certain that they 
never circulated in the lifetime of the teacher, who would 
have rejected all such appeals to the miraculous. Buddha 
himself never refers to them, and it is equally note- 
worthy that Jesus Christ does not allude to the super- 
natural occurrences connected with his nativity which 
are recounted in the first and second chapters of Mat- 
thew's and Luke's Gospels. 

Let us see now how these mythical accretions, which 



Edwin Arnold's Light of Asia. 305 

gradually encrusted the true biography of the holy man 
of India, are treated by Mr. Arnold. Here, for example, 
is his version of Buddha's incarnation, when watching 
from the sky the tangle of earth's miseries he willed to 
go again to help the world : 

That night the wife of King Suddhodana 
Maya the queen, asleep beside her lord. 
Breamed a strange dream— 

****** 

Awaked, 
Bliss beyond mortal mother's filled her breast, 
And over half the earth a lovely light 
Forewent the morn. The strong hills shook ; the waves 
Sank lulled ; all flowers that blow by day came forth 
As 'twere high noon ; down to the farthest hells 
Passed the queen's joy, as when warm sunshine thrills 
Wood-glooms to gold, and into all the deeps 
A tender whisper pierced. "Oh ye," it said, 
" The dead that are to live, the live who die, 
Up rise, and hear, and hope ! Buddha is come ! " 
Whereat in limbos numberless much peace" 
Spread, and the world's heart throbbed, and a wind blew 
With unknown freshness over lands and seas. 

When in due time the boy thus harbingered and thus 
conceived was born to Maya, there came, as we have 
said, "merchantmen from afar bringing, on tidings of 
this birth, rich gifts on golden trays ; " and it seemed 
fit to call this child of the people's hope the Prince 
Savarthasiddh — "All Prospering" — which we find in 
the poem abbreviated to Siddartha. After eight years 



306 Chats about Boohs. 

have passed, the king bethinks him to have Siddartha 
taught the Braminic lore, together with the accom- 
plishments of the warrior caste, and seeks out for that 
purpose a certain sage, accounted "the wisest one, the 
furthest seen in scriptures, and the best in learning, and 
the manual arts, and all." We pass oyer some interesting 
scenes, in which the poet exhibits a curious acquaintance 
with Hindu science, including the elaborate methods of 
enumeration and measurement, and in which the Prince 
approves himself the "teacher of his teachers." We 
come to an occurrence that first disclosed the breadth of 
Buddha's benignant mission, which comprehended, as 
we know, not merely men, like those of other evangel- 
ists, but the lower animals, and all beings that have 
conscious life. It befell, we are told, in the royal garden, 
on a day of spring : 

A flock of wild swans passed voyaging north 
To their nest-places on Himala's breast. 

****** 

And Devadatta, cousin of the prince, 
Pointed his bow, and loosed a wilful shaft 
Which found the wide wing of the foremost swan 
Broad-spread to glide upon the free blue road, 
So that it fell, the bitter arrow fixed, 
Bright scarlet blood-gouts staining the pure plumes. 
Which seeing, Prince Siddartha took the bird 
Tenderly up, rested it in his lap- 
Sitting with knees crossed, as Lord Buddha sits— 
And, soothing with a touch the wild thing's fright, 
Composed its ruffled vans, calmed its quick heart, 



Edwin Arnold's Light of Asia. 307 

Caressed it into peace with light kind palms 
As soft as plantain leaves an hour unrolled. 

But while the boy's hand draws the steel point from 
the wound, and seeks with honey and cool leaves to heal 
the smart, his cousin claims the bird as being the lawful 
prize of him who fetched it down. The young Gautama's 
demurrer is set forth in a passage of so much tenderness 
and beauty that we must be permitted to cite it at length : 

Then our Lord 
Laid the swan's neck beside his own smooth cheek 
And gravely spake, " Say no ! the bird is mine, 
The first of myriad things which shall be mine 
By right of mercy and love's lordliness. 
For now I know, by what within me stirs, 
That I shall teach compassion unto men 
And be a speech less world's interpreter, 
Abating this accursed flood of woe, 
Not man's alone ; but, if the prince disputes, 
Let him submit this matter to the wise 
And we will wait their word." So was it done ; 
In full divan the business had debate, 
And many thought this thing and many that, 
Till there arose an unknown priest who said : 

" If life be aught, the saviour of a life 
Owns more the living thing than he can own 
Who sought to slay — the slayer spoils and wastes, 
The cherisher sustains ; give him the bird : " 

' Which judgment all found just ; but when the king 
Sought out the sage for honor, he was gone ; 
And some one saw a hooded snake glide forth — 



308 Chats about Boohs. 

The gods come ofttimes thus ! So our Lord Buddha 
Began his works of mercy. 

As the son of a king, Siddartha is brought up in all 
the luxury of an Oriental court, but his wistful and medi- 
tative ways alarm his warlike father, who has no mind 
that any son of his shall tread the path of self-denial, 
wherefore he craves council of his ministers how the 
boy's pensive moods may be dispelled, and his feet turned 
into some road befitting his years and station. The eldest 
of them suggests what he assures the king will cure these 
thin distempers, and that is to weave the spell of woman's 
wiles about the young man's heart : 

Find him soft wives and pretty playfellows ; 
The thoughts ye cannot stay with brazen chains 
A girl's hair lightly binds. 

So they devise a plan by which, unconsciously, the 
prince shall choose a bride and cheat himself into hap- 
piness. A festival is arranged, at which the loveliest 
maidens of the realm are made competitors in youth and 
grace, and as the victors pass the king's son to receive 
their prizes from his hands, certain of the councillors are 
charged to mark " if one or two change the fixed sad- 
ness of his tender cheek." Yet we are told that the 
beauteous march was ending and the prizes spent, while 
still the Prince sat passionless, when last 

Came young Yasodhara, and they that stood 
Nearest Siddartha saw the princely boy 
Start, as the radiant girl approached. A form 



Edwin Arnold's Light of Asia. 309 

Of heavenly mould ; a gait like Parvati's ; 
Eyes like a hind's in lovetime, face so fair 
Words cannot paint its spell ; and she alone 
Gazed full — folding her palms across her breast — 
On the boy's gaze, her stately neck unbent. 

" Is there a gift for me ?" she asked and smiled. 

" The gifts are gone," the prince replied ; "yet take 
This for amends, dear sister, of whose grace 
Our happy city boasts ; " therewith he loosed 
The emerald necklet from his throat, and clasped 
Its green beads round her dark and silk-soft waist ; 
And their eyes mixed, and from the look sprang love. 

Yasodhara is given to the prince, and it is worth 
noting that Gautama has but this one wife, thus lend- 
ing to monogamy the sanction of his example, though 
polygamy was afterward tolerated by Buddhism in 
countries where the practice was firmly rooted. Mean- 
while, however, the boy's father does not trust to love 
alone, but creates a species of walled pleasure-place, like 
the Happy Valley of Easselas, from which the sad sights 
of the world, and every suggestion of death, or age, sor- 
row, or pain, or sickness are studiously shut out. Three 
times, however, at his desire, the young prince is suf- 
fered to pass the boundary, and is roused from his 
epicurean existence by three incidents, viz., the sight of 
an old man tottering under the weight of years, of a 
young man tossing in the raging heat of fever, and of a 
corpse lying exposed by the roadside. When he learns 
that old age and suffering and dissolution are the sure 
lot of all, his sadness is alloyed with no selfish desire of 



310 Chats about Boohs. 

escape from such miseries, but seems to rise only from 
intense sympathy with the sorrows of others. Hence- 
forward the comforting of mankind and the deliverance 
of the world from the pangs and mockeries and despairs 
of transitory life become his dominant aims : 

Siddartha turned 
Eyes gleaming with divine tears to the sky, 
Eyes lit with heavenly pity to the earth ; 
From sky to earth he looked, from earth to sky, 
As if his spirit sought in lonely flight 
Some far off vision, linking this and that, 
Lost — past — but searchable, but seen, but known. 
Then cried he, while his lifted countenance 
Glowed with the burning passion of a love 
Unspeakable, the ardor of a hope 
Boundless, insatiate : "Oh ! suffering world, 
Oh ! known and unknown of my common flesh, 
Caught in this common net of death and woe, 
And life which binds to both ! I see, I feel 
The vastness of the agony of earth, 
The vainness of its joys, the mockery 
[ Of all its best, the anguish of its worst. 

* * * * * * # 

J 
The veil is rent 

Which blinded me ! I am as a_l these men 

Who cry upon their gods and are not heard 

Or are not heeded— yet there must be aid ! 

For them and me and all there must be help ! 

Perchance the gods have need of help themselves, 

Being so feeble that when sad lips cry 

They cannot save ! I would not let one cry 

"Whom I could save ! " 



Edwin Arnold's Light of Asia. 311 

Very striking is the account of the temptations which 
environ the young prince, and tend to shake his purpose 
to forego the delights which make his present home a 
paradise, and fare forth into the waste, seeking wisdom, 
after the manner of holy men, in hunger and nakedness 
and pain. Esj)ecially touching is the scene where he 
takes leave of Yasodhara, who is about to become a 
mother. She has wept herself to sleep, and, stirring in 
her slumbers as if at the passing of some dream, her lips 
half framed the words : "The time — the time is come !" 
"Whereat Siddartha turned : 

" I will depart," he spake ; " the hour is come ! 
Thy tender lips, dear sleeper, summon me 
To that which saves the earth, but sunders us ; 
And in the silence of yon sky I read 
My fated message flashing. Unto this 
Came I, and unto this all nights and days 
Have led me ; for I will not have that crown 
Which may be mine ; I lay aside those realms 
Which wait the gleaming of my naked sword ; 
My chariot shall not roll with bloody wheels 
From victory to victory, till earth 
Wears the red record of my name. I choose 
To tread its path with patient, stainless feet, 
Making its dust my bed, its loneliest wastes 
My dwelling, and its meanest things my mates. 
Clad in no prouder garb than outcasts wear, 
Fed with no meats save what the charitable 
Give of their will, sheltered by no more pomp 
Than the dim cave lends or the jungle bush. 
This will I do, because the woful cry 



312 Chats about Boohs. 

Of life and all flesh living cometh up 
Into my ears, and all the soul is full 
Of pity for the sickness of this world ; 
Which I will heal, if healing may be found 
By uttermost renouncing and strong strife. 
******* 

This will I do, who have a realm to lose, 

Because I love my realm, because my heart 

Beats with each throb of all the hearts that ache, 

Known and unknown, these that are mine and those 

Which shall be mine, a thousand million more 

Saved by this sacrifice I offer now. 

Oh, summoning stars ! I come ! Oh, mournful earth ! 

For thee and thine I lay aside my youth, 

My throne, my joys, my golden days and nights, 

My happy palace — and thine arms, sweet queen I 

Harder to put aside than all the rest ! 

Yet thee, too, I shall save, saving this earth ; 

And that which stirs within thy tender womb, 

My child, the hidden blossom of our loves, 

Whom if I wait to bless my mind will fail. 

Wife! child! father! and people! ye must share 

A little while the anguish of this hour, 

That light may break and all flesh learn the law. 

Now am I fixed, and now I will depart, 

Never to come again till what I seek 

Be found — if fervent search and strife avail." 



Then passing through the barred gates of his pleasure- 
place, and riding far enough from the city to baffle pur- 
suit, he dismounts, strips himself of his princely robe, 
and putting on a mendicant's dress takes an alins-bowl 



Edwin Arnold's Light of Asia. 313 

wherewith to beg his daily bread, and determines hence- 
forth to be known by no other name than Sakya-Muni, 
the Becluse of the Sakyas. To attain the enlighten- 
ment for which he had renounced the pride and joys of 
life, he first studies under the Brahmins, but gets no 
help from books. He next joins a group of ascetics, but 
after six years' patient endurance he finds that the road 
to wisdom does not lie through extreme austerities. 
Accordingly he forsakes them, and announces modera- 
tion in all things, or a medium course of discipline, as 
the fundamental principle of his system, declaring that 
i ' the man who would discourse sweet music must tune 
the strings of his instrument to the medium point of 
tension." Meanwhile his reputation as a sage and holy 
man had waxed so high that a neighboring monarch 
ofcered him a share in his kingdom, and he was con- 
stantly approached by poor and rich for counsel and 
consolation. It is to be noted, however, as a character- 
istic feature of his ministry, that neither at this time, 
nor at any period of his life, did he exercise or claim 
the power of interfering with the normal course of 
nature. Miracles, indeed, were imputed to Buddha by 
the legends that grew up in later ages among corrupt 
and degenerate votaries, but there is no trace of them in 
the early authentic record. It is a distinctive mark of 
Buddha's mission that he neither assumes to be invested 
with supernatural gifts, nor to speak from inspiration. 
What he achieves he achieves simply as man, and 

affirms that as much can be done by any of his fellows 
14 



314 Chats about Boohs. 

who will as utterly throw off the thraldom of the senses 
and reach the same unselfish heights. When some 
enthusiast sought a sign from him to convince the people, 
he answered : " The miracle my disciples should show is 
to hide their good deeds and confess their short-comings." 
We haye pointed out that Buddha's gospel differs from 
all other faiths, in that its errand of love and pity is not 
to man alone, but to all sentient things. It is one of his 
cardinal tenets not only that it is infamous by the sacri- 
fice of animals to seek favor for ourselves at the cost of 
another's suffering, but that it is a brutal abuse of force, 
and a slur on the bounty of earth's granaries to slay ani- 
mals for food. The logical consequence of animal sacri- 
fice was depicted in these words : " If a man, in worship- 
ping the gods, kills a sheep of price, and so does well, 
why should he not kill his child, his parent, or his dear- 
est friend by way of offering, and so do better ? " Bud- 
dha's teaching on this head is finely paraphrased by Mr. 
Arnold in a passage of his fifth book, where the Eecluse 
of the Sakyas enters the palace hall of Bimbasara at the 
hour of sacrifice, and sees the priest's knife drawn to 
strike the victim. Then Buddha softly said : 

" Let him not strike, great king ! " and therewith loosed 
The victim's bonds, none staying him, so great 
His presence was. Then, craving leave, he spake 
Of life, which all can take but none can give, 
Life, which all creatures love and strive to keep, 
Wonderful, dear and pleasant unto each, 
Even to the meanest ; yea, a boon to all 



Edwin Arnold's Light of Asia. 315 

Where pity is, for pity makes the world 

Soft to the weak and noble for the strong. 

Unto the dumb lips of his flock he lent 

Sad pleading words, showing how man, who prays 

For mercy to the gods, is merciless, 

Being as god to those ; albeit all life 

Is linked and kin, and what we slay have given 

Meek tribute of the milk, and wool, and set 

Fast trust upon the hands which murder them. 

Thus spake he, breathing words so piteous 

With such high lordliness of ruth and right, 

The priests drew back their garments o'er the hands 

Crimsoned with slaughter, and the king came near, 

Standing with clasped palms reverencing Buddh ; 

While still our Lord went on, teaching how fair 

This earth were if all living things be linked 

In friendliness and common use of foods, 

Bloodless and pure ; the golden grain, bright fruits, 

Sweet herbs which grow for all, the waters wan, 

Sufficient drinks and meats. Which when these heard, 

The might of gentleness so conquered them, 

The priests themselves scattered their altar flames 

And flung away the steel of sacrifice ; 

And through the land next day passed a decree 

Proclaimed by criers, and in this wise graved 

On rock and column : " Thus the king's will is :— 

There hath been slaughter for the sacrifice 

And slaying for the meat, but henceforth none 

Shall spill the blood of life nor taste of flesh, 

Seeing that knowledge grows, and life is one, 

And mercy cometh to the merciful." 

It is a mistake to suppose that the exceptional benig- 



316 Chats about Boohs. 

nity of Buddha's creed in this particular was an inevi- 
table corollary from his doctrine of transmigration. He 
did not invent, but merely ratified that belief in metemp- 
sychosis which in his day was universally held in India, 
but where, nevertheless, the slaughter of the lower ani- 
mals, for one purpose or another, seldom provoked re- 
buke. 

At length, after years of travail, when his eyes are 
dimmed and his strength spent, the truth is revealed to 
Gautama. We are told that the day of enlightenment 
came as he was seated one evening, under a banian tree 
which for centuries afterward was an object of pilgrim- 
age, and of which a branch, transplanted to Ceylon 245 
B.C., took root and grew and is still extant, being un- 
questionably the oldest historical tree in the world. The 
supreme moment was preceded by a touching temptation 
— a peasant woman leading her little child by the hand 
to offer food to the holy man, and thus carrying back his 
thoughts to the home he had left. But with the draw- 
ing on of night comes the supernatural side of the strug- 
gle, which is described with all the wealth of Oriental 
imagery. Mara, the demon of love Cwho corresponds to 
Milton's Belial, in " Paradise Eegained "), with his 
daughters and angels environ and caress him. The 
Buddhist account of this conflict between The Saviour 
of the world, and the Prince of Evil, is treated with such 
singular vigor by Mr. Arnold that, we propose to collate 
it with a passage in "Paradise Eegained," in which the 
reader will remark a certain correspondence. In the 



Edwin Arnold's Light of Asia. 317 

poet/ s narrative Buddha has already repelled some of the 
subtlest spirits of evil — the Sin of Self, the Sin of Doubt, 
and Superstition disguised as Faith, when there draws 
nigh a braver tempter, ' ; The King of Passions who hath 
sway over the Gods themselves : " 

And round him came into that lonely place 
Bands of bright shapes with heavenly eyes and lips 
Singing in lovely words the praise of love. 

These hymned to Buddh 
Of lost delights, and how immortal man 
Findeth naught dearer in the three wide worlds 
Than are the yielded, loving, fragrant, breasts 
Of Beauty, and the rosy breast blossoms 
Love's rubies ; nay, and toucheth naught more high 
Than is that dulcet harmony of form 
Seen in the lines and charms of loveliness 
Unspeakable, yet speaking, soul to soul, 
Owned by the bounding blood, worshipped by will 
Which leaps to seize it, knowing this is best. 
This the true heaven where mortals are like gods, 
Makers and masters, this the gift of gifts 
Ever renewed and worth a thousand woes. 
For who hath grieved when soft arms shut him safe, 
And all life melted to a happy sigh, 
And all the world was given in one warm kiss ? 
So sang they with soft float of beckoning hands, 
Eyes lighted with love flames, alluring smiles ; 
In dainty dance their supple sides and limbs 
Revealing and concealing like burst buds 
Which tell their color, but hide vet their hearts. 



318 Chats about Books. 

Beside this let us place the famous lines in the second 
book of the " Paradise Kegained," where, in the council 
of fallen angels, Belial devises means whereby the Saviour 
of Mankind may be seduced from his high mission. It 
is curious to note how relatively lacking in pictorial 
power is the Miltonic sketch, the emphasis being laid for 
the most part on subjective effects : 

Set women in his eye, and in his walk, 
Among daughters of men the fairest found ; 
Many are in each region passing fair 
As the noon sky ; more like to goddesses 
Than mortal creatures, graceful and discreet, 
Expert in amorous arts, enchanting tongues 
Persuasive, virgin majesty with mild 
And sweet allayed, yet terrible to approach, 
Skilled to retire, and in retiring draw 
• Hearts after them, tangled in amorous nets. 
Such object hath the power to soften and tame 
Severest temper, smooth the ruggedest brow, 
Enerve and with voluptuous hope dissolve. 
Draw out with credulous desire, and lead 
At will the manliest, resolutest breast, 
As the magnetic hardest iron draws. 

With the dawn the conflict ended, and Buddha's mind, 
unmoved from its fixed purpose, at length beheld the 
way of enlightenment and salvation for mankind. What 
was this "way" by which men should escape the griefs 
of age, disease and death ? It lay, we are told, in these 
four " Noble Truths," viz., that sorrow exists ; that sor- 
row waxes and accumulates through desires and cravings 



Edwin Arnold's Light of Asia, ■ 319 

after objects of sense ; that sorrow may be extinguished 
by entering on the " Four Paths," and that these paths 
of safety are perfect doctrine, perfect will, perfect speech, 
and perfect deed. These truths, absorbed and developed 
to their consummate flower in practice, conduct to the 
repose and the beatitude of Nivrana. Before looking at 
the noble and winning forms which these conceptions 
take in Mr. Arnold's poem, let us glance at a few of the 
points brought out by Dr. Beal in his analysis of Bud- 
dha's system. The right doctrine contemplated is not to 
be acquired from books or evolved from metaphysical 
speculation, but to be gained through the purification of 
the mind from all unholy desires and passions. In 
Buddha's view, the perfection of wisdom is indistin- 
guishable from the perfection of goodness. Flawless 
goodness once attained, the soul has no longer any need 
to be born again, and passes into that rest which is the 
perfection of being. In other words, Buddhism is a re- 
ligion of ethical self -perfecting, based upon the corner- 
stones of self-conquest and self-sacrifice. Self-conquest 
is to be compassed by the observance of the five com- 
mandments, which we will cite presently in Mr. Arnold's 
paraphrase. Self-sacrifice is to be demonstrated by a 
limitless charity, a devotion to the good of others which 
rises to an enthusiasm for humanity, and an unwavering 
kindness to all sentient things. The motives to the 
practice of this religion are addressed partly to the ego- 
istic hope of individual melioration, and partly to the 
altruistic sentiment of sympathy. Not only does each 



320 Chats about Boohs. 

man, by a life of beneficence and self-control assure him- 
self a more thoroughly purged spirit in the next stage of 
existence, but the sum of human weakness and human 
misery will thus have been diminished. Each new birth 
is conditioned by the Karma — the aggregation of the 
merit and the demerit of previous births in the same 
family. Moreover, we are collectively that which the 
last generation has made us, and the next generation 
will be that which we now make. What is this but a 
recognition of the two factors, heredity and environment, 
for one of which we are wholly unaccountable, whereas 
modern scientists agree with Buddha that we can, to an 
appreciable extent, adjust and modify the other. Comte's 
Eeligion of Humanity contemplates nothing else than 
such a strenuous and concurrent improvement of our 
material and social and ethical conditions as shall inure 
to the steady elevation of the race. That sympathy plays 
a far more active role than egoism in the Buddhist sys- 
tem is attested by the fact that its founder did not 
preach or sanction the doctrine of conscious transmigra- 
tion ; it is only in Nirvana, or rather in that penultimate 
state of absolute perfection preceding absorption, that 
the good man's vision is quickened to perceive the steps 
of his painful progress. But the dominance of the al- 
truistic side in Buddhism is best shown by its failure to 
long commend itself to that stubborn individualism 
which is the distinctive trait of the Aryan Volkgeist or 
race spirit. In its Indian birthplace scarce a trace of it 
survives, and though its millions of devotees spread 



Edivin Arnold's Light of Asia. 321 

from Ceylon to Java, from the Straits of Malacca to the 
Kara Sea, and from Japan to Swedish Lapland, they do 
not include a single people of Aryan origin. By a curi- 
ous parallel in the history of the great riyal faith, Chris- 
tianity was rejected by the Semitic nation which gave it 
birth, and it has failed to maintain a firm and fruitful 
life among those more or less Semitized communities of 
western Asia and north Africa, where it was first planted. 
We may add that the only Aryan religion which has held 
its ground in the land of its nativity is the Braminic 
system, which in its caste institutions exhibits the most 
stupendous embodiment of human selfishness. 

The first seven books of the poem, as we have said, 
are mainly narrative, and with them "The Light of 
Asia," regarded as an epic, is rounded to a close. The 
eighth book is devoted for the most part to an exposi- 
tion of the Buddhistic philosophy and ethics, and here 
the reader's power of comprehension and assimilation is 
signally assisted by the author's intuitive grasp and il- 
lustrative imagery. It may be that all students will not 
concur with Mr. Arnold's conception of Nirvana, or 
with his estimate of the Buddhist system as a means to 
the regeneration of human life, but it will be frankly 
conceded that he has approached his theme in that ap- 
preciative attitude and that reverential spirit which, in 
the presence of vast facts, supply the torch of insight 
and the key of veritable knowledge. Let us yet find 
space for some citations from that large discourse deliv- 
ered on his late home-coming by the holy man of India 



322 Chats about Boohs. 

in presence of his father's court, his child between his 
knees, and his beloyed Yasodhara at his feet. Here, 
for example, are the five rules fashioned to guide aright 
amid the entanglement and stress of daily life, "the 
first true footfalls in the Fourfold Path : " 

Kill not, for Pity's sake, and lest ye slay 
The meanest thing upon its upward way. 

Give freely and receive, but take from none 
By greed, or force, or fraud, what is his own. 

Bear not false witness, slander not, nor lie ; 
Truth is the speech of inward purity. 

Shun drugs and drinks which work the wit's abuse; 
Clear minds, clean bodies, need no Soma juice. 

Touch not thy neighbor's wife, neither commit 
Sins of the flesh unlawful and unfit. 

The following lines interpret Buddha's recognition of 
household and social duties, and of the modest paths in 
which the mass of mankind must walk : 

Manifold tracks lead to yon sister-peaks, 

Around whose snows the gilded clouds are curled ; 
By steep or gentle slopes the climber comes 
Where breaks that other world. 

Strong limbs may dare the rugged road which storms, 

Soaring and perilous, the mountain's breast ; 
The weak must wind from slower ledge to ledge, 
With many a place of rest. 



Edwin Arnold's Light of Asia. 323 

Dear is the love, I know, of wife and child ; 

Pleasant the friends and pastimes of your years ; 
Fruitful of good life's gentle charities ; 
False, though firm-set its fears. 

Live — ye who must — such lives as live in these ; 
Make golden stairways of your weakness ; rise 
By daily sojourn with these phantasies 

To lovelier verities. • 

So shall ye pass to clearer heights and final 

Easier ascents and lighter loads of sin, 
And larger will to burst the bonds of sense, 
Entering the Path. 

And here, finally, is Mr. Arnold's account of the 

'philosophy of the Karma, or law of retribution, which 

teaches that no deed or speech or thought is sterile, 

' but must figure somewhere on the debit or the credit 

side of humanity's account : 

. The books say well, my brothers. Each man's life 
The outcome of his former living is ; 
The bygone wrongs bring forth sorrows and woes, 
The bygone right breeds bliss. 

If he who liveth, learning whence woe springs, 

Endureth patiently, striving to pay 
His utmost debt for ancient evils done 
In Love and Truth alway. 

If making none to lack, he thoroughly purge 

The lie and lust of self forth from his blood ; 
Suffering all meekly, rendering for offence 
Nothing* but grace and good ; 



324 Chats about Books. 

If he shall day by day dwell merciful, 

Holy and just and kind and true ; and rend " 
Desire from where it clings with bleeding roots, 
Till love of life have end ; 

He — dying — leaveth as the sum of him 

A life-count closed, whose ills are dead and quit, 
Whose good is quick and mighty, far and near, 
So that fruits follow it. 

No need hath such to live as ye name life ; 
That which began in him when he began 
Is finished : he hath wrought the purpose through 
Of what did make him Man. 

Never shall yearnings torture him, nor sins 

Stain him, nor ache of earthly joys and woes 
Invade his safe eternal peace ; nor deaths 
And lives recur. He goes 

Unto Nirvana. He is one with Life 

Yet lives not. He is blest, ceasing to be. 
Om, mani padme, om ! the Dewdrop slips 
Into the shining sea. 

The last stanza enbodies Mr. Arnold's conception 
of that ultimate state held up by Buddha as the goal 
and prize of perfect living. We need not say that 
Buddha's meaning has been variously expounded at dif- 
ferent epochs and by different schools of commentators. 
The sublime but nebulous and elastic thought of absorp- 
tion and repose lends itself to many definitions, and 
should doubtless be credited with much of the marvellous 
assimilative power displayed by Buddhism. Mr. Arnold's 



Edwin Arnold's Light of Asia. 325 

interpretation, he tells us, is not only the fruit of con- 
siderable study, but of a firm conviction that a third of 
mankind could never have been brought to believe in 
blank abstractions, or in nothingness as the issue and 
crown of being. His own view is further emphasised in 
the following six lines, with which our quotations from 
this remarkable book must end : 

If any teach Nirvana is to cease, 

Say nnto such they lie. 
If any teach Nirvana is to live, 

Say unto such they err; not knowing this, 
Nor what light shines beyond their broken lamps, 

Nor lifeless, timeless bliss. 

We must now take leave of a poem which we venture 
to affirm will be held precious by more than one genera- 
tion of Englishmen. Seldom in our day have so large 
poetic gifts been turned to such high and admirable 
account as in "The Light of Asia." Alike by its 
scheme and its execution, by the charm of its technical 
felicity and the capacious purport of its theme, this 
poem challenges no minor rank in the list of English 
epics. It is a work of thought and learning, and it is a 
work of art. There seems to be an exquisite propriety 
in such a tribute from an English hand to the greatest 
name of India. It constitutes a fitting monument to 
one of the most gracious, beneficent, and majestic lives 
which have dignified humanity and helped to purify the 
world. - - 



CHARLES READE. 

The man must have a dull eye and a cold heart who 
can have followed the performances of Charles Reade 
during the past thirty years without cordial sympathy 
and sincere admiration. He has worked as hard in his 
vocation of man of letters as ever Southey worked, yet 
he shows no sign of exhaustion ; he has produced almost 
as much as that versatile, voluminous, and well-nigh 
forgotten writer, but, unlike him, has not inflicted one 
prosy sentence on the reader. Mr. Reade seems to have 
begun with a modest, under-estimate of his own abilities, 
and a just estimate of the scope and requisites of his 
art, and few things are more interesting or instructive 
than to mark the gradual unfolding of his talents and 
the patient improvement of his workmanship, under the 
pressure of a resolute will and the beacon light of clear 
and well-placed aims. 

Those who choose to judge an author by the hasty 
letters which he occasionally indites for the newspapers 
in a burst of not unreasonable wrath, rather than by the 
elaborate works of art which embody his deliberate and 
conscientious effort, may not be prepared to see humility 
cited as a characteristic trait of Mr. Reade. As a mat- 
ter of fact, however, a diffident self-ajopraisement is the 
key to his earlier vagaries in matters of type and punc- 



Charles Reade. 327 

tuation, and it has been the main-spring of his growing 
success. We may perhaps find in it, too, an index of 
the quality and limitations of his talent. What distin- 
guished this man from other novices in his beginning 
was the distinctness, we might say the piercing and 
discouraging distinctness, with which he perceived the 
essential, incurable defects of the written word as an 
instrument of transmission or portraiture. Anybody 
can see how far most weavers of English prose fall short 
in their power of expression of Bacon, or Swift, or Bus- 
kin ; but few discern how far these very models fell 
short of the writers' own conceptions. No student of 
style, if it be not Lessing, has descried more keenly the 
inseparable shortcomings of written language than the 
author of " Never Too Late to Mend." Now it is 
obvious that one who could lay his finger so unerringly 
on the flaws of the literary medium, could hardly fail 
to grade aright the skill of those who had found means 
to manipulate it, and therefore could not share the 
blind assurance of most tyros, or conceive himself com- 
petent at the start, if ever, to vie with the great masters 
of pictorial diction. In a word, Mr. Reade's short-lived 
attempt to compass the end of literary art by a flank 
movement, by the adventitious aids of mixed type, novel 
punctuation, broken sentences or any other device which 
should hit the reader's sense, and shoot the meaning 
into his brain, really attested an auspicious sincerity of 
purpose and a profound lack of confidence in the writer's 
powers of efficient work in the normal way — not the 



328 Chats about Boohs. 

eccentricity and charlatanry which silly people saw in 
it. But whatever might be said for such mechanical 
helps to the projection of ideas, if they had long been 
naturalized on the printed page, it soon became evident 
to the innovator himself that their present application 
frustrated his main purpose, their strange and grotesque 
aspect diverting the reader's mind from the thought to 
the mere vehicle of utterance. 

Accordingly Mr. Eeade soon set himself to toil in the 
old ruts and to extort from the verbal apparatus handed 
down to us what potency of expression lay in it. He 
does not seem to have been born an artist in language ; 
perhaps no man is, and yet we cannot but think Sterne 
and Thackeray must have owed quite as much of their 
nimble unwavering felicity to nature as to study ; in- 
deed, the aroma of their humor often seems too subtle 
and evanescent to consent to any but an intuitive em- 
bodiment. It is safer, however, to minimize the share 
of intuition and to magnify the share of industry in every 
artistic achievement, and if we are led to dwell with 
special emphasis on the painstaking habits of this partic- 
ular author, it is because in his initial ventures the 
workman did not always hide his tools — his ideas and 
images moved somewhat stiffly in their dress of words, 
although the latter was uniformly trim and fresh, never 
second-hand or slovenly. But looking at his later books 
— for example, this new comer, " Woman-Hater " — we 
find his command of the English tongue almost unique 
among contemporary writers. His management of its 



Charles Reade. 329 

structure and idiom is as deft and supple as Matthew 
Arnold's, and his vocabulary will be found, upon com- 
parison, to have a wider range than George Eliot's, if 
hers in "some directions seems to be more richly stored. 
If we except certain dainty, ethereal kinds of irony and 
humor, and also the loftier and least selfish strivings of 
human nature (about whose absence in the work of this 
author we may wish to say a word), there is scarcely any 
theme conceivable, short of abstract science, or technical 
art, to which Mr. Eeade's style does not happily lend it- 
self in the present volume. We come now and then 
(though not frequently) on bits of scenery to match 
whose cleanness and vividness of touch we should have 
to go to Euskin and Walter Scott ; both of those famous 
landscape painters would have used more strokes of the 
brush. There are dialogues, too, whose dash and sparkle 
and exquisite economy of words might be paralleled, 
perhaps, in Congreve, but scarcely in any later English 
dramatist or novelist ; and, finally, there are embodied 
characters, human beings, which, on the somewhat 
homely plane of thought and purpose where they dwell, 
are as sharply outlined, as sinewy and as instinct with 
life, as are the figures of "Currer Bell." Such firm and 
large control over the resources of our language may 
have been gained, as the author more than once frankly 
tells us, by intense, methodical and unremitting labor, 
but it is not the less a splendid proof of genius. 

This mastery of diction is well exemplified in the vol- 
ume before us ; open it at random and on almost every 



330 dials about Boohs. 

page you encounter some snatches of dialogue or frag- 
ment of description which will bear quoting. Thacke- 
ray, Dickens, and George Eliot can bear this simple but 
conclusive test of finish and felicity, but let the reader 
apply it to Scott, Fielding or Bulwer, and mark how 
hard it is to hold the precise phraseology in the memory. 
If we except some discourses of Parson Adams, and the 
account of Partridge at the play, we doubt if even Lord 
Macaulay could have cited a long paragraph from the 
author of "Tom Jones." The burnished and incisive 
style of Mr. Eeade, his sedulous and sustained literary 
workmanship, ought to commend him strongly to French 
readers, who have been taught to exact a like merit from 
their own novelists. Another characteristic trait would 
be better appreciated on the other side of the Channel 
than at home, and that is the dramatic quality of his 
narratives. Many of them have been, and all might be, 
adapted for the stage. We, however, have become so 
accustomed to the biographical novel, that it rarely 
occurs to us to dissect one of Dickens's oi\ Thackeray's 
stories and observe on what a meagre and incomplete 
skeleton of plot their creations have been built. Thacke- 
ray himself often lamented the poverty of his invention 
in this particular, and ranked the power of dramatic 
construction and evolution high among the qualities 
which, in his judgment, made Fielding unapproachable. 
This latest work of Mr. Keade's, "The Woman Hater/' 
is not only fertile in exciting situations, some of which 
are new to fiction, but they are graduated with much 



Charles Reade. 331 

nicety to a climax, and seem to emerge one from another 
by a species of organic growth. Here and there the 
reader will note an incident which has no bearing on the 
movement of the tale, but we have found none which 
did not serve the turn of accenting the temper or mo- 
tives of some one of the actors. 

Owing to the fact that the two greatest humorists of 
the century chose to address it in the novel form, the 
English reading public accepts the most clumsily and 
loosely fashioned narratives, provided they introduce 
some striking or engaging types of character. There is, 
it seems to us, a tendency to underrate Mr. Reade's skill 
in characterization. It is true that none of his concep- 
tions have niched themselves in our- remembrance in 
the sense that Little Nell, Dick Swiveller, Colonel 
Newcome and Major Pendennis are household denizens ; 
yet we venture to predict that Christie Johnstone and 
Peg Woffington, Triplet and David Docld will be found 
to have a firm hold upon the next, as well as the present 
generation. "We do not recall one book of Mr. Eeade's 
whose chief actors are not individualized, and whose 
features, physical and mental, are not deeply printed on 
the mind, being almost always self -betrayed in action or 
dialogue, and very seldom catalogued by the author. 

As regards, for instance, the two foremost characters 
brought on the stage in " A Woman Hater," we must 
recognize dramatic art both in the drawing of the 
figures and in the juxtaposition. The contrast between 
a profound, calm, loyal, and noble feminine nature, 



332 Chats about Boohs. 

and a shallow, graceless, but captivating scamp, — the 
twain, moreoyer, being linked by marriage and the 
still stronger tie of indestructible affection on the 
woman's part — this contact and conjunction of irrec- 
oncilable elements is the motif of the tale. No doubt, 
it suggests the groundwork of " Eomola ; " but Ina 
Klosking is more self-centred, less emotional, and less 
etherealized, or in other words, of coarser clay, than 
George Eliot's heroine, while Edward Severne is a Pito 
duly Anglicized, that is, divested of physical timidity, 
and transplanted into the nineteenth century and actual 
social conditions. It is not easy to exaggerate the 
adroitness wkh which the author portrays the tortuous, 
insinuating, glittering, destructive course of this unique 
impostor, who is an adept in every kind of roguery, 
who forges bills of exchange to satisfy a whim, who 
half kills one woman by an act of brutal violence, and 
who hangs through the greater part of the book on the 
verge of bigamy with another, yet who is handsome as a 
picture, graceful, supple, and many-sided as a Greek, 
irresistible to men as well as women, and a consummate 
master of arts and hearts. In the hands of a second-rate 
novelist such a figure would have been quite unman- 
ageable ; we should have been proof against his alleged 
seductions, and marvelled that the people about him 
could be so egregiously taken in. But in this case we 
yield to the fascination of the winsome, incorrigible 
rascal ; he disarms us as well as his enemies ; indeed, he 
proves in the end, like Frankenstein, too much for his 



Charles Beade. Boo 

creator, and lest he should recapture the wife whom he 
had cruelly outraged, and so throw the story out of 
joint, the author is obliged to kill him. 

Not only is the dialogue uniformly crisp and racy and 
not seldom studded with wit and epigram, but a piquant 
humor has been infused into several of the characters 
here presented. The writer contrives to make ex- 
tremely diverting the figure of the woman-hater him- 
self, who of course like most professed mysogynists is at 
heart a devout worshiper of the vilipended sex. Much 
of the comedy of this book is supplied by the brisk en- 
counters between this disenchanted and philosophical 
young man, and a sprightly, unconventional specimen 
of the flirt species on the one hand, and a singularly 
astute and acrid maiden lady, who fills with relish the 
office of duenna, on the other. So, too, the advent of a 
female doctor among the hinds of an old-fashioned rural 
village is made to form a mirthful episode, in which 
the mode of life, ideas, and language of the English 
agricultural laborer are reproduced with an admirable 
realism. 

Mr. Reade, in fact, is always a realist, as much so as 
was Mr. Trollope, although his realism is of an artistic, 
not a mechanical sort. For the most part the latter gave 
us only pale photographs reflecting with prosaic exacti- 
tude such commonplace scenes and persons as in the 
West End of London or the society of a cathedral town 
we should see every day but might not care to look at 
twice. The former, on the other hand, shows a painter's 



334 Chats about Boohs. 

skill in culling and grouping, in heightening the colors 
of nature just enough to compensate for the imperfect 
medium in which he works, in devising situations calcu- 
lated to quicken somewhat the pulse of normal human 
nature ; yet is he studious always to adjust the drawing, 
the tints, the movement of his picture to the propor- 
tions and the atmosphere of actual, or easily conceivable 
experience. The result is that, while we readily admit 
that Mr. Trollope's characters may have lived in the 
flesh, a languid doubt too often arises whether such ex- 
istence was worth describing ; we do not hunger for, 
although we could tolerate, their acquaintance ; we look 
with a listless eye on their insipid joys and small 
ambitions, and find it hard to care a straw whether the 
distressingly correct or mildly naughty youths who make 
shift to fill the role of heroes fare well or ill in their 
tame wooings. But give a young woman one of Mr. 
Reade's books, and, ten to one, she will cry out with Mi- 
randa, " Oh, brave, new world, that hath such creatures 
in't ! " Certainly, there is no young man worth his salt 
who would not fall head over ears in love with any one 
of fifty damsels who gleam upon him from these volumes. 
In this, as in other features which recall the great 
founder of the English novel, we can see that the author 
has been a faithful student of Henry Fielding. But as 
in "Tom Jones," "Amelia," and "Joseph Andrews," 
so in all of Mr. Reade's novels (if we leave out one re- 
markable character brought forth in the present book, 
and at which we will presently glance), peopled as they 



Charles Reade. 335 

are with virile and amiable beings, warm of color and 
quick with life, it must be said that the plane of thought 
and feeling is near the earth. The horizon of his actors 
is circumscribed to those sexual and domestic affections 
in which a personal, indeed a selfish, element is never 
absent — to that sphere of practical endeavor whose end 
is worldly comfort and content. To sow and to reap, 
to love and to wed, to be healthful and happy under the 
sun, is the goal and sum of their hope and motive. They 
know no deeper promptings, no higher strivings, the 
atmosphere they breathe is the hale, but somewhat 
heavy English air unleavened with that fine ether of 
anxious self-probing and self-discipline, of impersonal, 
wide sympathy, of sublime aspiration, which bathes 
some parts of " Romola " and " Daniel Deronda," light- 
ing up what were otherwise a reflex of common exist- 
ence with the mirage of an ideal and nobler life. It is 
true that such figures as Dorothea in " Micldlemarch " 
and Daniel Deronda are of too lofty stature and fashion- 
ed of too dainty clay to suit Fielding's canvas, yet these 
are not impossible denizens of earth. If, then, there 
is such a thing as high art in novels as well as poetry, 
those beings are fit subjects for the highest who embody 
most completely and luminously the sweetness and self- 
sacrifice, the worth and majesty of human nature. 

Viewing the general level on which his persons think 
and live, as well as the technical merits of the writer, we 
might have to place in the category of those who follow 
Fielding too faithfully, and fly too near the ground, Mr. 



336 Chats about Boohs. 

Reade, had he not in his latest work made known to us 
one woman — Ina Klosking — who almost deserves to rank 
with G-eorge Eliot's " Romola," that is to say, among the 
few high and. spiritual creations with which English fic- 
tion has enriched us. The author is himself aware that 
he is here essaying a much loftier flight than any to 
which he had accustomed his readers. He tells us he 
has long marked and regretted that many able writers 
are doing much to perpetuate the petty vices of a sex, 
which, under the existing social system, is only half ed- 
ucated, by devoting thick volumes to such women as 
biography, though a lower art than fiction, would not 
waste pages on. They say, "we write the average wom- 
an for the average woman to read," but they are not 
consistent, for the average woman is under five feet and 
ugly, whereas their paltry creatures are all Homerically 
beautiful and tall. Now fiction, he continues, has just 
as much right to pick out large female souls as painting 
has, and a perverse selection is as false and ignoble in 
art, as to marry a pretty, brainless face is silly in con- 
duct. Besides, it gives the female reader a low model 
instead of a high one, and so does her a little harm, 
whereas a writer might do her a little good, or try, at all 
events. Having all this in his mind and remembering 
how many noble women have shone like stars in every 
age and land, and feeling sure that, as civilization ad- 
vances, such women will become far more common, Mr. 
Reade has tried in his novel to look ahead and paint 
"la Klosking." 



JULES VERNE'S DIDACTIC FICTION. 

It is not impossible that the familiar field of social 
life to which the novel properly confines itself may be 
abandoned by some impatient writers, dazzled by the 
temporary success of psuedo-scientific romance. Before, 
however, we are flooded with imitation of Mr. Jules 
Verne's prolusions it may be well to inquire whether his 
books do not disclose grounds for believing that the re- 
vulsion of public taste will be far more unequivocal than 
its present propitious drift. Where a long series of vol- 
umes purporting to convey useful information in capti- 
vating form is put forth under the warrant of reputable 
publishers, set off with the most sumptuous embellish- 
ment that printer and engraver can bestow, and pushed 
into circulation by all the levers known to the booksell- 
ing trade, it is not surprising that the easy-going reader 
should accept the author for a time at his own valua- 
tion, and regard with naive respect his pretensions to 
universal knowledge. But when a young woman with 
the help of a cheap atlas, and the school-boy, armed 
with his " Play Book of Science," may go on exposing 
blunder after blunder, the question is pressed upon us 
whether books like Verne's possess any claim to serious 

attention, or whether the slips and botches of the sciolist 
15 337 



338 Chats about Books. 

are not so ubiquitous in his works as to render them 
impertinent and even contemptible.' 

The motive which prompts some persons to buy " The 
Mysterious Island " and its companion-pieces. is perhaps 
sufficiently intelligible. So much prestige attaches 
just now to scientific attainments, that even the young 
woman of fashion and the average college graduate 
(perhaps not the least torpid member of society) are not 
unwilling to secure the materials of pyrotechnic display, 
provided they are not called upon for more strenuous 
headwork than is demanded by the perusal of an ordi- 
nary novel. And doubtless if it were possible to infuse 
a modicum of scientific truth by a species of hypodermic 
injection, our normal conversation would be the brighter 
for it. But the authors may be reckoned on the fingers 
who, knowing themselves competent to teach, have con- 
descended to say profound' things amusingly, and even 
with them the instructor is so far merged in the artist 
that they constantly forget to edify, and may be said to 
demonstrate the difficulty of drawing pleasure and profit 
from one fountain. The didactic poem has been ridi- 
culed as a contradiction in terms, and no one probably 
would deny that even Virgil's Georgics, if read for their 
poetry (and of course in the present state of agriculture 
they could be read for nothing else), are hardly relieved 
from dulness by elaborate ornament ; while the poem of 
Lucretius is delightful precisely in the ratio of its 
failure to offer a coherent exposition of the epicurean 
philosophy. And so with the historical novel, which 



Jules Verne's Didactic Fiction. 339 

never yet in any eminent degree (with the possible ex- 
ception of Victor Hugo's "Notre Dame") has united 
dramatic vitality and authentic photography. Scott's 
essays, for instance, in that field, are notoriously in- 
accurate as pictures of mediaeval manners, while books 
like Becker's " Charicles," or Helps's attempt to por- 
tray human life under the conditions of the Lacustrine 
epoch, are ingenious mosaics of established fact and 
legitimate induction, but, wanting plot and characteri- 
zation, prove insufferably tiresome. 

On the whole, the most successful experiments in the 
direction of didactic fiction have been made by De Foe 
and Swift, and the short-comings of Verne appear glar- 
ing by contrast with the methods of those artists. 
Neither accuracy nor congruity is sinned against by 
those masters of illusion. The rudiments of many 
technic arts as practised in De Foe's day are described 
in his best known work, and it was precisely the 
author's minute familiarity with the {>rocesses of their 
several crafts, and his dexterous application of them to 
rude instruments and materials, which persuaded arti- 
sans, at all events, of the authenticity of Crusoe's narra- 
tive. Crusoe's travels in Siberia and Tartary produced 
a like impression of verisimilitude on the Eussian mer- 
chants of London, and the achievement was the more 
remarkable because so little information respecting 
those countries was then accessible in print. In short, 
De Foe's work, though it should be shorn of the art- 
ful, homely touches which impregnate his characters 



340 Chats about Boohs. 

frith life, would remain a tolerable manual or guide- 
book, and this manifestly should be the decisive test 
of the historical or scientific romance. A similar 
punctilious exactitude in details invests the chronicles 
of Gulliver with an atmosphere of reality. As it 
has often been pointed out, we need but to postulate 
the existence of human beings dwarfed to a given 
size, and straightway the microscopic kingdom of Lili- 
put becomes a marvel of proportion and concinnity. 
We at once discover that the dimensions of domestic 
animals, of trees, ships, houses, are adjusted with 
mathematical precision to the scale of the puny inhabit- 
ants, while even the moral and social consequences of a 
diminutive physique are developed in the laws and cus- 
toms, the statecraft and diplomacy of the little common- 
wealth. Again, how much minute and trustworthy 
observation of equine character and habits underlies 
the humor of the Houhynhms ! And so with all of 
Gulliver's experiences — your credulity is taxed but 
once, at the outset of the narrative. If you are able 
to swallow the premise, your discernment and artistic 
sense will be cunningly nattered and stimulated by 
the coherence and symmetry of the structure reared 
on it. 

Now, suppose a man of parts — like Swift, or Edgar 
Poe, whose " A. Gordon Pym " was framed upon good 
models — had undertaken to recount an aerial voyage, 
say to the planet Mars, what would be his preparation 
and procedure ? In the first place, doubtless, he would 



Jules Verne 's Didactic Fiction. 341 

saturate his memory with the accepted facts of physical 
science, especially of dynamics, chemistry, and as- 
tronomy. Next he would so imbue his mind with the 
right methods of research, and so scrutinize the drift of 
speculation as at length to descry and discriminate 
those concentric penumbrse of the probable and possible 
which circumfold the known. In a word, he would aim 
to compass not merely the acquisitions of the savant, but 
that disciplined circumspect imagination which con- 
tributes the vital spark to scientific discovery. He 
would be constrained probably to deal with the awk- 
ward preliminary problem of aerial navigation through 
regions of space beyond our atmosphere, by some un- 
tenable, though specious, hypothesis, and would meet 
the difficulty of supplying his aeronaut with oxygenated 
air by an ingenious if impracticable device. But here his 
resort to subterfuge and obvious sophism would end. 
Henceforward every step of the process would be planted 
on the firm ground of demonstrative truth or legitimate 
inference, and would command the serious attention of 
the learned as well as the wonder of the uninstructed 
reader. And if he chose to delineate the marvels of 
some august civilization for which the age of the planet 
Mars might afford a plausible basis, we may be sure that 
the details of his picture would reveal at all events the 
correlation and gradation of a conceivable world, and a 
wary adaptation of social phenomena to the modified 
conditions of human life. We need not say. that a 
romance of this character would not be disfigured by 



342 Chats about Boohs. 

puerile mistakes and oversights, much less betray an 
ignorance of simple dynamic laws and the fundamental 
data of chemistry. 

The value of such a work regarded as a stimulus to 
rational curiosity, or even as suggesting a possible clue 
to systematic investigation, it might be difficult to ex- 
aggerate. We could well afford to excuse some de- 
ficiencies in the direction of mere human interest, since 
no doubt the processes of the artist and the teacher, 
which didactic fiction seeks to confound, are essentially 
incapable of fusion. It will hardly be said that we 
would .place our supposed author on too high a plane 
of technical knowledge. Although such acquisitions as 
have been outlined might exact considerable application, 
we submit that without approximation to them scientific 
romance is an impertinence. 

It is not perhaps a matter of supreme importance to 
the average reader whether he derives his impressions of 
English history from Freeman, Stubbs and Lingard, or 
from Scott's novels and Shakespeare's plays, but some 
correct notions of geography are necessary for the com- 
prehension of current events, and nothing but flounder- 
ing and bungling in very simple concerns can result from 
an absorption of fallacy and error in those applied 
sciences whose threads are interwoven in countless ways 
with the warp of every-day life. Moreover, historical 
blunders are tolerably sure of correction. There is little 
harm to be apprehended from a book like Abbott's 
" Napoleon," because the antidote is at hand in veritable 



Jules Verne's Didactic Fiction. 343 

histories much more attractive in form. But ordinary 
people find scientific treatises hard reading, and we 
should be justified, therefore, in abating as a nuisance 
such works as apply the same spurious embellishment 
to the truths of physical science, and assuming to offer 
a banquet of curious information puts us off with scraps 
and heeltaps. 

It is true that error is of trifling consequence in books 
written for children whose education has scarcely begun. 
They haye time to winnow wheat from chaff, and at the 
outset, perhaps, sagacious instruction aims rather to in- 
terest than to edify. We haye known a relish for botany 
and natural history to be awakened in young people by 
an absurd rhapsody called the " Swiss Family Robinson." 
But nobody would recommend to grown-up people Bal- 
zac's " Recherche de FAbsolu," in the hope that his 
nebulous speculations would prompt them to serious re- 
search in the domain of chemical affinities. We cannot 
shut our eyes to the fact that ordinary men and women, 
once immersed in the stream of business, of society, read 
chiefly for amusement ; and therefore in the case of 
adult persons the mass of vulgar errors held in solution 
in ephemeral literature has little chance of being precipi- 
tated through the action of systematic study. A nota- 
ble contribution to the crudities and figments afloat in 
current conversation may be traced to the writings of 
Jules Verne. Every young woman in society has read 
them, every vivacious young man can quote them, and 
impart to his discourse a scientific glimmer which re- 



344 Chats about Books. 

sembles knowledge as the phosphorescence of decayed 
bones resembles a calcium light. 

The astonishing vogue of these productions constitutes 
their chief claim to criticism, but they may also be said 
to challenge it by a special eminence in worthlessness. 
In most works of the kind extravagant blunders are 
only occasional, or at worst sporadic, relieved by inter- 
vals of tolerable accuracy ; but our French author's un- 
veracity must be accounted chronic, since he can rarely 
complete a dozen pages without some perversion of fact. 

At the first glance, indeed, it seems improbable that 
books absolutely valueless should obtain exceptional 
success in more than one language ; and we may be 
reminded that French reviewers, who received Mr. Verne 
with quite unanimous approval, are by no means con- 
spicuous for lenity, and have a particularly keen eye for 
charlatans. But a very trite observation, which has 
escaped nobody at all conversant with the French press, 
may account for their charity on this occasion. French 
journalists and litterateurs are in one direction exceed- 
ingly ignorant men. It would be superfluous to qualify 
this statement by a reference to the distinguished record 
of French scientists, who are often masters likewise of 
effective statement, and whose lucid, methodical dis- 
cussions of recondite topics contrast so agreeably with 
the clumsy expositions of German savans. Of course 
no veritable student of science would waste consideration 
on a writer like Yerne, but would silently turn him over 
to his confreres of the literary guild. Now the Parisian 



Jules Verne's Didactic Fiction. 345 

litterateur pur et simple is a model in respect of work- 
manship and style, has often a profound acquaintance 
with the resources of his language, and its standards of 
artistic excellence ; is sufficiently familiar with the history 
of France, and has commonly explored with curious 
attention some phases of urban life. To the geography 
and history however of foreign countries he betrays a 
ludicrous indifference, and his attempts to delineate 
alien types of character — for example the English or the 
American — rarely transcend the limits of burlesque. 
The progress of physical science he surveys with Olym- 
pian unconcern, and it is probably demonstrable that 
his fund of metaphor has received scarcely any accessions 
from that source since the epoch of Voltaire. In short, 
a national tendency to regard form as of more moment 
than matter — which, to say the least, is not discouraged 
by the French Academy — is emphasized in the case of 
the journalist by tradition and education. Naturally, 
therefore, finding in Jules Verne the merit of an agree- 
able style, at once nervous and correct, he commends 
him heartily, avows himself captivated by the playful 
treatment of a novel theme, and is willing to take on 
trust statements of fact which might cost him some 
pains to verify. Once happily launched in France, the 
books soon found their way to England and America, 
where publishers, scenting a lucrative speculation, em- 
barked some capital in the venture, and took the usual 
means puff their wares. 
Unquestionably, if the love and reverence of the 
15* 



346 Chats about Boohs. 

young is rightly deemed a precious guerdon of labor, 
Jules Yerne has not missed his reward, for we are in- 
formed by readers of "Sandford and Merton" that the 
reputation of the brilliant Mr. Barlow has been totally 
eclipsed by the cyclopaedic Frenchman. So, too, if 
Athenian many-sidedness stamps the ideal of culture, it 
would perhaps follow that M. Verne is a cultivated 
man, for if he does not squarely face, he certainly con- 
trives to squint in many directions. If we accept, as 
we have said, the dictum of Paris journalism, we must 
acknowledge him to be an honor to France ; but we are 
able to match him with that British worthy whose broad 
and varied acquisitions were catalogued by Samuel 
Butler. The latter's learning, we are assured, like our 
French author's, was capable of most amusing applica- 
tions : 

For he by geometric scale 

Could take the size of pots of ale, 
Resolve by sines and tangents straight 
If bread and butter wanted weight, 
And wisely tell what hour o' the day 
The clock doth strike by algebra. 

And yet the biographer of that eminent savant 
ventures to insinuate a modest doubt — which is begin- 
ning to suggest itself to some readers of Jules Verne — 
as to the value of his extensive erudition : 

For't has been held by many that 

As Montaigne, writing of his cat, 

Maintained she thought hira out an ass, 

Much more she would Sir Hudibras. 



HENBY JAMES, JB. 

I. 

A new novel by Henry James, Jr., is certain to com- 
mend itself to those who appreciate artistic workman- 
ship. The circle of such readers is not a yery wide one, 
and admiration, in this case, falls a good deal short of 
enthusiasm. It might have been supposed, however, that 
one of his latest stories — " Washington Square " — : was 
intended to enlist the sympathies of a larger audience, 
being, as it is, a study of American men and women, 
viewed under the conditions of New York society, un- 
disturbed by the introduction of English or Continental 
types. If the author had any such design, it has appar- 
ently miscarried. There is nothing in "Washington 
Square " to extend the esoteric reputation acquired by 
the author of " The American " and " The Europeans," 
and there is much in it to indicate that he is, in some 
degree, disqualified for writing a vivid, forceful Ameri- 
can novel. In a word, this book discloses, in a specially 
palpable and emphatic way, the capabilities and limita- 
tions of Mr. James's literary talent. 

It is a testimony to the sterling qualities of Mr. 
James's work within a certain sphere that his readers 
are instinctively impelled to judge him by a high stand- 
ard. They are continually reminded, in his book, of 

347 



348 Chats about Boohs. 

Matthew Arnold's dictum, that " we mean by art, not 
merely an aim to please, but also and more, a law of 
pure and flawless workmanship." If any American now 
seeking to please through the medium of English prose 
has recognized this law and striyen to embody it in his 
own compositions, it is indisputably Mr. James. He 
has studied with incomparable patience, and with a 
striking measure of success, all the technical processes 
that go to make up effective literary exposition, group- 
ing and perspective, projection and suggestion, the in- 
terplay of light and shade, boldness deftly interchanged 
with delicacy of drawing, distribution, accentuation, and 
economy of color. Far more keenly alive than most of 
his fellow novelists seem to be to the fact that an artist's 
work begins with the choice of a pregnant theme, and 
the selection of a new and promising point of view, he is 
also far more painstaking in that mental evolution and 
manipulation of the central thought which must, of 
course, precede the effort toward verbal exhibition. 
When we come to scan the visible results of ihis careful 
preparation, and test the writer's power of pictorial in- 
terpretation, we find that he has the power of saying 
just what he means, but not of saying it with electric in- 
tensity. While he has the admirable reticence which 
forbids expression to exceed by a hair's breadth the scope 
and intention of the thought, he has not in a superlative, 
but only in a moderate degree, the illuminating and pro- 
creative gift of thinking in -metaphor. Moreover, his 
diction, while correct and finished, lacks grace and spon- 



Henry James, Jr. 349 

taneity, is nervous but not sinewy, neat and lucid, but 
seldom beautiful. On the whole, no one would deny 
that Mr. James is a singularly expert and accomplished 
artist with the pen ; that he is conspicuously well 
equipped for the task of reproducing what he sees and 
telling what he thinks. Unluckily, he does not see 
enough and he thinks too analytically. Here we strike 
shortcomings which lie altogether without the compass 
of technical attainment, and which suggest a qualifica- 
tion of Matthew Arnold's definition. Mr. James is sedu- 
lous, as we haye said, about the choice of theme, but it 
commonly proves to be a narrowjone. In his treatment, 
too, he seldom swerves from a point of view once taken, 
but his point of view is always that of an inquisitive 
psychologist, critical of his fellow-men, and tolerably 
well satisfied with himself. 

When we call a man, says Mr. Arnold, emphatically 
an artist, a great artist, we mean by art not merely an 
aim to please, but also and more, a law of pure and flaw- 
less workmanship. Given, however, an equal approach 
to technical perfection, it is clear that we measure de- 
grees of merit in an artist by the relative beauty or sub- 
limity of the thing portrayed. We do not place the 
Dutch school on the same level with the school of Leo- 
nardo and Raphael. The mind tires of dwelling on the 
patient scrutiny and elaborate fidelity with which a Dutch 
master pries into and reproduces every insignificant de- 
tail of a -mean or homely scene ; it irks us to see so much 
technical ability lavished upon objects whose originals 



350 Chats about Books. 

would scarcely win from us a glance. Now, it seems to us 
that the persons Mr. James selects for portrayal are, as 
a rule, essentially common-place, their aims circum- 
scribed, their motives petty, and their lives incapable of 
rousing anything like eager or poignant interest. They 
are all trying to get into society, or, having gained a 
certain rung on the social ladder, are pondering how 
they shall mount higher toward the consummate assim- 
ilation of English manners, ways of thought, and modes 
of speech which Mr. James, not perhaps unjustly, con- 
ceives to be the goal of refined Americans. The author 
never wearies of intimating the huge difficulty, not to 
say hopelessness, of the undertaking, and marks with 
quiet subacid irony the faults of judgment and blunder 
of execution on the part of his aspiring countrymen. 
He loves, for instance, to depict some Bostonian who, 
after twenty years of observation and self -discipline, has 
contrived to leave on the hasty Gallic or Teutonic eye 
the impression of a sick Englishman, and after bestow- 
ing cautious commendation on the counterpart to place 
it suddenly in sharp and disenchanting contrast with 
the Simon-pure article, a genuine English aristocrat. 
See, the author seems to say, men of Boston, how vain 
are all your efforts ; you cannot elude my glance, and 
it is doubtful whether I myself, who have exposed your 
shortcomings, could deceive a Briton. Now it does not 
strike us that such types, though amusing, doubtless, 
and in their small way edifying, are deserving of pro- 
longed or very minute study. Yet it must be owned 



Henry James, Jr. 351 

that Mr. James, so far as lie draws Americans at all, 
has usually regarded them, not as illustrating elemental 
traits of human nature, or as interpreting the pressure 
of a unique environment, but rather as grotesque con- 
trasts, or awkward approximations to representatives of 
European society, viewed in its most artificial and super- 
ficial aspect. 

While his themes lack breadth and dignity, his treat- 
ment of them is wanting in creative power and picto- 
rial vivacity. He seems to be a man distinguished for 
the fineness rather than the keenness of his sensations ; 
for the delicacy of his insight rather than the intensity 
of his sympathies. He gives you the notion of one 
devoid of passions, and a little puzzled, not to say 
annoyed, by the passions of other people. His point 
of view is always that of intellectual attention, never 
that of profound, self-effacing feeling. In his lighter 
moods, he has the air of a sprightly quidnunc, who 
watches life as if it were a puppet show, while in his 
graver moments he has the searching cold look of a sur- 
geon who treats the world as a dissecting room. The re- 
sult is that his characters, for the most part, are desti- 
tute of objective vitality ; we do not care much for them, 
for we cannot bring ourselves to believe in them. We 
are not always willing to affirm that they never were 
animated beings, but we are ready to aver that they 
are alive no longer. They are not abstractions, neither 
are they the living subjects of a surgical operation, 
whose blood spurts and whose flesh twitches under the 



352 Chats about Boohs. 

knife ; they are the pale, inert subjects of a deliberate 
autopsy. 

In the story "Washington Square" the author has 
confined himself more rigorously than usual to his role 
of psychologist. Although the title of the book leads us 
to expect a good deal of local color, there is really yery 
little in its pages. There is nothing in the motive, 
the situations or the main characters which need have 
hindered the writer casting the scene of the narrative in 
Dublin or in Edinburgh. The four persons who figure 
in the foreground of the tale are a shrewd father, a dull 
daughter, a silly aunt, and a sly young man who means 
to marry a fortune. The father is a physician, and is 
obligingly credited with uncommon aptitudes for diagno- 
sis and dissection, but the remarkable thing about the 
book is that the other three personages are only a step 
or two behind him in the fervor and minuteness of their 
analytical studies. The father pierces the young man's 
designs and tracks the slow evolutions of his daughter's 
intellect ; the daughter ponders the equation of duty and 
inclination with the speechless absorption of a mathema- 
tician ; the aunt revels in exploring the romantic aspects 
of the affair, and the young man concentrates his mind 
on its fiscal elements. Each of them goes about, so to 
speak, with a microscope, and when the author inter- 
venes in his own person it is to verify discoveries, or re- 
adjust a focus, or substitute, it may be, his private lens 
of ostensibly superior power. Long before we have 
finished the tale we have become so immersed in psycho- 



Henry James, Jr. 353 

logical speculation that we have ceased to care a button 
whether the young woman and young man break off the 
match or marry ; and, strange to say, the author exhibits 
the same indifference. It is true that something per- 
functory is said touching a broken heart ; but inasmuch 
as the victim loses none of her physical activity, and 
positively gains weight under the operation, we know 
that neither she nor the author believes a word of it. On 
the whole, Mr. James seems to have taken relatively 
little interest in this performance, owing, it may be, to 
the fact that the characters are all labelled American, 
and that no chance is offered to disclose and emphasize 
their social shortcomings through the juxtaposition of an 
Englishman, or even a Continental European. 

II. 

The situation whose elements and results are depicted 
in one of Mr. James's more expanded and substantial 
novels is suggested by the title, " Confidence." A man 
of mature years, who has indulged at College in the 
species of hero worship which is such a common outcome 
of academical conditions, is represented as retaining one 
of these juvenile friendships in its original effusive in- 
tensity. For the classmate who still seems to him the 
incarnation of all that is admirable and wise he carries 
respect and deference to such extraordinary lengths as 
to submit to his inspection and deliberate judgment the 
lady whom he desires to marry. He sends for him to 
come all the way from Italy to Baden to take note of the 



354 Chats about Boohs. 

young lady's looks, and words, and ways, and to test 
them in the crucible of a frigid cynical analysis. In 
order that the experiment may be conducted with due 
leisure and circumspection, the undetermined lover leaves 
the lady and his friend together and departs on a journey 
of uncertain duration. Inasmuch as he is himself a 
rather slow-witted, unattractive person, as the .young 
lady is both beautiful and captivating, and as the friend 
intrusted with the delicate functions of critic and arbiter 
is not, by any means, unsensitive to feminine charms, 
the consequence of such curious hesitation and childlike 
faith may be easily foreseen. The young lady and the 
friend fall in love with one another, and the cautious, 
trustful man, who wishes to have the impulse of his 
heart sanctioned by another's cool approval, finds him- 
self rejected on his return. Thus nakedly and crudely 
outlined, the motive of the story seems to have nothing 
^novel or specially suggestive in it ; and it may be said 
in general that Mr. James's constructive faculty is weak. 
It is remarkable, however, how much the author has 
succeeded in making by dexterous manipulation out of 
these somewhat meagre and shop-worn materials. By 
artful strokes in the use of subordinate incidents he has 
contrived to give the situation an air of originality, and 
he has in this instance infused so much distinctness and 
animation into his principal characters that we are able 
to follow their action with serious, if not precisely ardent, 
interest. The young man who is regarded by his over- 
trustful comrade as a sort of Bostonian Crichton has, of 



Henry Jcmies, Jr. 355 

course, an odious role to fill, and the skill with which 
the author manages to make him, on the whole, accept- 
able to the reader, and therefore eligible as an object 
of the young lady's regard, is certainly striking. The 
heroine herself is one of the fey/ tolerably strong and en- 
gaging figures that Mr. James has drawn. For the. con- 
fiding lover we are made to entertain a mild disrelish, 
which ripens at last into frank contempt when we learn 
that he has never known his own mind. 

All the persons of this novel belong to the class of 
partially Europeanized Americans, who are the favorite 
subjects of the author's study. They all try to frame 
their colloquial idioms on the models supplied by London 
society, of which, as a rule, there is no adequate evidence 
forthcoming that they have any intimate knowledge. 
Such opportunities, however, as are afforded by the 
American colonies in foreign cities, or the chance ac- 
quaintances formed at tables d'hote or in railway car- 
riages, they have turned to shrewd account, and their 
careful reproduction of English modes of speech might, 
very possibly, impress a stay-at-home American. Even 
the author's best people, however — like the hero of this 
novel for instance, for whom by the way he seems to 
entertain a high respect — make some odd slips now and 
then ; a painful phenomenon, since they apparently live 
for no larger purpose than to completely weed their 
speech of Yankee solecisms. One of these slips we may 
note in passing, and that is the employment of "won't" 
for the future indicative of the auxiliary verb. We 



356 Chats about Books. 

venture to say that Mr. James has never heard this 
word used for "I will not " in London drawing-rooms 
and clubs. No one, of course, would point out such a 
trivial blemish, if the repudiation of Americanisms and 
a close approach to the idioms in vogue among well-bred 
Englishmen were not avowedly or by implication com- 
mended in this book and other writings of Mr. James 
as the flower and crown of American culture and 
achievement. Eor our own part, we consider that the 
aim thus extolled is, in the first place, petty, and in the 
second futile, but a discussion of this topic would carry 
us too far. 

Here we would direct attention, however, to a matter 
suggested by the present story. Why is it that the great 
mass of English gentlemen and ladies, excluding, of 
course, those gifted with exceptional powers of insight 
and reflection, persists in regarding well-bred Americans 
as an improved species of cads ? Few persons who 
know England well will dispute that this curious preju- 
dice is still impregnably rooted in English society, al- 
though its outward expression has been checked since 
the extraordinary increase of our national prestige which 
followed the collapse of the rebellion. We may well call 
this feeling curious, because no other people, no matter 
how rude and primitive its social structure may be, en- 
counters this secret antipathy and persistent misconcep- 
tion. It is a fact that Brazilians, Mexicans, Peruvians, 
the natives of West India Islands, and of petty Central 
American States, while they doubtless have reason to 



Henry James, Jr. 357 

observe that dislike of foreigners in general which is 
characteristic of the Briton, yet awaken less instinctive 
aversion and quiet, supercilious disdain than do we 
whose social appliances, standards, and customs are cer- 
tainly higher than can be found elsewhere on this conti- 
nent. This apparent anomaly, so grievous to our 
national self-love, is perfectly intelligible, and a recent 
story of Mrs. Oliphant's, "Mrs. Arthur," suggests the 
explanation. 

The denizens of Mayfair and Belgravia cannot gauge 
the birth, breeding and social surroundings of a Chilian 
or Costa Rican Ambassador by the common test of 
phrase and idiom, because he speaks a foreign tongue. 
They are constrained to judge of him by his dress, car- 
riage, and demeanor ; in other words,- by those elements 
of social equipment which are most easily acquired. 
Our countrymen, on the other hand, stand in this respect 
on precisely the same footing as unknown Englishmen 
who are encountered for the first time in London society. 
They are approved or condemned according as their 
speech conforms to the standard accepted by well-bred 
people. This is a test which for obvious reasons a native 
of the United States cannot sustain. No American 
gentleman, either in New York or Philadelphia, or even 
in painstaking Boston, can use with even tolerable cor- 
rectness the idiom of Mayfair. Indeed, no sensible man, 
who means to pass his days in his own country, would 
seek to do so. Mr. Motley did but recognize an inexora- 
ble fact when he said, as he was fond of saying, that we 



358 Chats about Boohs. 

have an American language with canons of its own. It 
would be strange if the broad dissemblance in natural 
and social conditions to which the two sections of the 
English-speaking race have been subjected for two cen- 
turies had not left its mark upon their idioms. Of 
course, every spoken language, like every other living 
organism, is in a state of constant growth and decay, of 
accession and rejection, of adjustment to the physical 
and spiritual environment. Here in America the Eng- 
lish language has been exposed not only to a different 
kind, but to a different rate of change. Now, no social 
odium attaches anywhere to the coinage of new words — 
terms which portray novel ideas and recognize altered 
circumstances. That is a process which is going on all 
the time among the English settlers in Australia, in 
India, at the Cape of Good Hope, in New Zealand, in- 
deed, under all the multifarious conditions of the British 
colonial empire. What is more to the purpose, it is 
going on at the focus of English culture and refinement — 
in Belgravian drawing-rooms. We may venture, there- 
fore, to say that so far as the speech even of San Fran T 
cisco is really new — the genuine product of an endeavor 
to conform to strange surroundings — it will amuse and 
not disgust our English kinfolk. 

It is not our new words, but our old, which are nau- 
seous to Mayfair. While in many directions, doubtless, 
transformation has been more rapid, yet in others the 
American language has been more conservative than the 
English. We have kept many terms and idioms which 



Henry James, Jr. 359 

were correct and elegant enough in Milton's day, or even 
Addison's, but which in the older country have been 
discarded — discarded, that is by the higher and better 
educated classes, since language like a deciduous tree 
begins to slough off at the top. There is not a single 
peculiarity due to conservatism in our American speech 
which cannot be found somewhere in the British Islands, 
in one or another of the lower walks of life. The secret 
of the mischievous effect produced upon the average 
Englishman by our verbal idiosyncracies, the greater 
part of which fall within the above category, is not that 
they are exotic and fantastic, but that they are unpleas- 
antly familiar. They are as familiar to him as the dirty 
hands, vulgar leer and shambling gait of the country 
clown, or the town lout. He has heard them a thousand 
times before, but always in the mouth of menials of low 
grade, of farm laborers, bargemen, stablemen, petty 
shopkeepers, and generally by the typical representative 
of that subterranean world which he holds to be inhab- 
ited by cads. TThen, therefore, the tricks of speech 
thus hopelessly discredited fall from American lips, 
how can an English lady or gentleman of ordinary men- 
tal calibre fail to regard them as the ineffaceable stamp 
of mean birth and breeding ? He or she does but obey 
the irresistible law of association, the law which even 
the clearest intellects escape only in moments of dis- 
passionate reflection, not in the practical conduct of 
life. 

A thing explained is half condoned. We shall bear, 



360 Chats about Boofcs. 

perhaps, with more resignation the disapproval of our 
English kin when we can trace it to a hasty and irra- 
tional but entirely natural deduction from insufficient 
premises. All those — and their name is legion— who 
would fain understand how hard it is for the ordinary 
well-bred Briton to view us with more indulgence should 
study this book of Mrs. Oliphant's, wherein we are in- 
troduced to a family fairly representing the lowest grade 
of the middle class. In this stratum of society we shall 
meet to our infinite annoyance with the precise sole- 
cisms and vulgarisms which are oftenest laid to our 
charge. 



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" Gaucherel, and others. 

One volume 16mo, cloth, $1.2S, 



" An interesting, gossippy, yet instructive little book." — Academy {London.) 

" A very readable and discriminating account of the leading theatres and actors oi 
.he French capital." — Christian Union {New York.) 

"Mr. Matthews has chosen a subject of great interest to most people, and he has 
the additional advantage of knowing what he is writing about. The chapters on the 
Grand Opera and on the Theatre Francais, the two most perfect establishments of the 
kind in the world, are full of valuable details and statistics." — Nation. 

" Just what a small book, dealing with such a subject, should be. It gives a great 
deal of information in an agreeable manner and is replete with anecdotes of the profes- 
sion. There are a number of illustrations representing the principal actors and actresses 
of the Comedie Francaise in costume, and views of the various places of amusement in 
Paris."— New York Herald. 

"Let us pay t ibute en passant to the sound characterization of Mile. Bernhardt' s 
occasional ' meretricious sensationalism.' . . . Nor shall we spoil the reader's enjoy- 
ment of his book by summarizing any of its parts — a work of unusual difficulty, by the 
way, seeing that each chapter is in itself the essence of a book or s-.veral books packed 
into as little compass as may be." — New York World. 

"An attractive and careful little volume. .... Mr. Brander Matthews has 
studied his theatrical Pans carefully. . . . There are few things as to which, with 
regard at least to its finer shades, there is more difference of opinion among students 
and experts than acting, and especially French acting. Mr. Matthews has a catholic as 
well as a cultivated taste, and his writing is interesting both for those who may agree with 
him entirely and for those who may find certain points on which to join issue with him." 
— Saturday Review {London). 



*#* For sale by all booksellers, or %e?it, post-paid, zipon receipt of 
price, by 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, Publishers, 

743 and 745 Broadway, New York. 



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